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THE ART 
OF THE ■ 
NOVELIST 



HENRY ■ • 
BURROWES 
LATHROP ■ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 



THE ART OF THE 
NOVELIST 



BY 



HENRY BURROWES LATHROP 

Associate Professor of English 
University of Wisconsin 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1919 



Oo^2> 






Copi-rihht, 1919, BT 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, IHO. , 



OCT 28 1919 



/ 

©CU536348 
Recorded 



PREFACE 

This book is for novel-readers. It is meant 
for those who have unreflectively and sympa- 
thetically read so many novels that they have 
begun to think about them, who have lived 
within the realm of the story-teller long enough 
to have some standards and ideals of their 
own, but have not denned these standards and 
ideals and thought them out into clear con- 
sciousness. Some such readers may find satis- 
faction in carrying further this reflective ap- 
preciation until they attain a more rounded and 
balanced view of the novelist's art. The author 
has no idea of indicating the way of approach 
to novels. Nothing, as Tieck says, is more 
destructive to sound literary judgment than to 
begin the study of works of literary art by the 
way of a premature philosophy, instead of by 
direct and ample experience, in instinctive 
obedience to the genius of the masters. Yet 
to many a reader there comes a time when he 
feels that he must add to that best and highest 

v 



S. 



PREFACE 

delight of frank imaginative sharing in the 
author's vision some definiteness in his view 
of great works, a definiteness which may con- 
tribute not merely to the enjoyment but to the 
appreciative understanding of the achievement 
of the creative mind, and which may make 
more secure the reader's discrimination be- 
tween what is great and what is merely fine, 
between what is solid and what is veneered, 
between what is noble in spite of faults and 
what is radically defective in spite of bril- 
liance. Thoughtful readers sooner or later find 
it not enough to be plunged in the delight of 
books ; they wish also to discern, compare, and 
judge. The author of the present book does 
not believe that such a temper is at all incon- 
sistent with a naive or even childish delight in 
a good story, for after years of reading novels 
and systematically thinking about them, he can 
still lose himself in a good story, and finds his 
youthful appetite for marvel unimpaired, so 
that as Clive Newcome says of dinners, " All 
are good, but some are better than others." 
Now if this be true of the Professor, the dry 
stick, why will it not be even more true of the 
unacademic reader, the green twig? 

The present writer makes bold to claim some 
vi 



PREFACE 

authority as an elder soldier in speaking with 
his comrade readers ; but he is not bold enough 
to give any commands to writers. In truth, he 
is not sure that he knows how to write a novel, 
having never tried. And the writer of fiction, 
even if he has the receipt of a successful novel, 
can hardly be hopeful of telling more than how 
he supposes himself to have succeeded. If 
there is one thing more certain than another, 
it is that there are many ways of literary excel- 
lence. The novelist is privileged to belong to 
a literary sect ; but the critic must be catholic, 
and have no creed not generally necessary to 
salvation. It is the hope of the writer that no 
reader will be led by this book to be unfriendly 
or inhospitable to any type of excellence. 

There are, of course, many works in the 
field which this book enters. More than two 
hundred in English are enumerated in the list 
by N. L. Goodrich in Bulletin of Bibliography 
(Vol. iv. p. 118; Vol. v. p. 79, 1906-1908). 

Most of these studies dwell upon the moral 
qualities, or else on the technique of the 
novelist. It is the object of the present work 
to bring into the foreground the fundamental 
elements of excellence — native imagination, the 

vii 



PREFACE 

temperament of the writer, and the fortunate- 
ness of his conception. It is in the nature of 
the man that the weight of his book consists — 
in the seriousness of his passion as to the uni- 
versal in things, and the force of his intellect 
in reflection upon them. It is in the imagina- 
tive intensity of his vision that truth and unity 
consist. It is on the idea, the fundamental 
conflict, the radical paradox, that interest 
must primarily depend. Craftsmanship, though 
necessary to realize these things, cannot make 
up for the lack of them. Yet it is upon crafts- 
manship, being obvious and teachable, that an 
analysis such as this book undertakes is likely 
to insist. It is my hope that I may help some 
readers to penetrate deeper than they other- 
wise might into the spirit of great novels. 

Though the illustrative references to novels 
run over a wide range, they are intentionally 
made in the main to familiar works of estab- 
lished reputation. The author has felt at lib- 
erty occasionally to illustrate or reinforce his 
points by reference to other forms of literature 
than the novel. The ways of art are one in 
spirit, though many in form. Some readers 
will observe the absence of a chapter on style. 
Upon style, the author finds himself unable to 

viii 



PKEFACE 

say anything interesting which is not indi- 
vidual to particular authors. No doubt, read- 
ers of flexible and sensitive literary apprecia- 
tion will be likely to feel as if that w T ere true 
of all generalizations about forms of art. I 
hope no one will say, however, as Goldsmith 
said of Karnes's Elements of Criticism, that it is 
easier to write such a book than to read it, for 
that would indeed make the lot of my readers 
unenviable ! 



IX 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Novel in Modern Liee . . 1 

II. The Sources of Interest . . 33 

III. The Fable 66 

y^N. Character ...... 114 

V. Tragedy and Comedy . . . 159 

l VI. Setting 198 

VII. The Point of View .... 252 

Index 283 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

CHAPTEE I 

THE NOVEL IN MODEKN LIFE 

Yeab by year throughout the last forty years, 
the mass of novels and tales printed in the Eng- 
lish language has been overwhelmingly greater 
than the whole number of any other class of 
books. In 1913, the last year of the distant 
world before the great war began in Europe, 
there were more than 8600 new books printed 
in the British Isles ; and of this total, more than 
1200 were works of prose fiction; — almost one 
in seven of the whole number. In 1912, the 
proportion was from one in six to one in five. 
Dragging at a long distance behind come works 
of theology and religion, their place challenged 
sometimes by scientific books, sometimes by his- 
tories, and occasionally in very recent years by 
sociological works. Moreover, the dominance of 
prose fiction is a recent phenomenon ; it belongs, 
as has been said, to the last forty years. From 

1 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

1870 to 1875, the number of new books yearly 
printed in the British Isles was about 3400 or 
3500. Of this total, in 1870 two hundred were 
novels, and three hundred and fifty, or nearly 
twice as many, were religious and theological 
books. Four years later over five hundred were 
novels; about four hundred and eighty — not 
quite so many — were religious books ; and since 
that year, with but a few slight, temporary, pre- 
liminary hesitations, the flood of prose fiction 
has risen until the watcher on the shore trembles 
for fear everything is to be engulfed. 

It was not always thus. If all the books 
printed in English before 1850 were gathered in 
one library, by far the most spacious compart- 
ment would be heaped with service books, 
volumes of theology and devotion, works of the 
church fathers. Indeed, everything used to be 
theological; the existence of witches and the 
right of kings and the nature of poetry were all 
treated under the guise of aspects of doctrine, 
of the law of the church, or of Christian morals. 
Early in the eighteenth century, some graduates 
of Harvard College found their library so ex- 
clusively theological that they determined to 
reform it and to modify its proportions. They 
were shocked and amazed, and not unnaturally 

2 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

so ; but the condition of things at Harvard was 
not the exception. It was the case everywhere, 
an inevitable result of the condition of society 
at the time of the invention of printing and of 
the religious struggles which had convulsed the 
world ever since. By their time the world had 
changed; and the feelings of these Harvard 
graduates constituted but one symbol manifest- 
ing the victory of the secular over the ecclesi- 
astical view of life, a victory of which many 
other phenomena of modern times are also 
symbols — among them the multitude of modern 
novels. 

Gro now into the public library of any Ameri- 
can town. The number of stacks devoted to 
prose fiction increases and overflows and is 
increased again. The public librarian is never 
quite at ease about his fiction circulation. On 
the one hand, he wishes the books in his library 
to be read, to be read fully and with delight; 
he is glad to provide entertainment, even amuse- 
ment, and to do his part toward creating 

" Joy in widest commonalty spread. " 

On the other hand, he is always afraid of being 
in effect the enemy of the noblest joys, of mak- 
ing the circulation of commonplace books> even 

3 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

good books, drive out the best books. He sup- 
ports general literature and informing books by 
all kinds of subtle and canny devices; but the 
figures of circulation will only budge a little 
way. He is obliged to struggle in order to keep 
the circulation of his fiction nearer two-thirds 
than three-fourths of the total ; and if he keeps 
the fiction under sixty per cent, he is inclined 
to plume himself, and rouses in the minds of 
other librarians the suspicion that he is coercing 
his public. The novel, as these facts show, com- 
mands the public interest quite as decidedly as 
it predominates in bulk of production and in the 
number of separate works. 

Novels, printed by tens or twenties in each 
year from 1750 to 1820, are now produced at 
the rate of a score a week. If it is true — as 
is most certain — that in the history of printed 
books is to be found the vital history of mod- 
ern thought and feeling, then the increase in 
the production of novels is one of the notable 
facts of the last hundred years. How and by 
what steps, by what advances, sudden or 
gradual, did it take place? The first great 
upward step came suddenly, between 1820 and 
1830. In the former year, as Professor Masson 
reasonably estimates in his British Novelists, 

4 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

there were about twenty-five long works of 
prose fiction, mainly novels, published in Eng- 
land; — one a fortnight. The number had been 
practically constant for some years. All at 
once the annual total starts up — in 1830 reach- 
ing at least a hundred and one, or two a week, 
and at that point remains practically un- 
changed for nearly thirty years, — in 1850 
being about a hundred, in 1856 about ninety. 
The reason of this leap forward, as Professor 
Masson believes, was the successful example of 
Sir Walter Scott. 

The great writers of realistic prose fiction 
before the day of Scott, — Cervantes, Le Sage, 
Fielding, Richardson, — had poured a complete 
life into a vast book, the spacious expression 
of a whole experience, and incapable of being 
repeated, though Fielding and Le Sage made the 
effort to do twice what can be done only once. 
Scott shortened novels, set the example of com- 
posing a library, made novel-writing a busi- 
ness, and has been followed by a multitude of 
facile and industrious smaller men, and by 
some as great as himself or greater. The 
world has now Trollope and Zola and Dickens 
and Balzac, in place of Suarez and Thomas 
and Bull and the Bollandists. Scott created a 

5 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

profession for such men as G. P. R. James and 
Harrison Ainsworth. For two generations 
after he had showed the way, nearly every man 
of letters wrote a historical novel; — not only 
novelists by occupation like Bulwer and Reade, 
Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, but 
critics like Lockhart, and polemic divines like 
Cardinal Newman and Charles Kingsley. Even 
the poets felt the impulse to compose historical 
fiction based on "documents." Tennyson 
wrote the Idylls of the King, Browning the 
Ring and the Book. The historians, Macaulay 
and Carlyle, Thierry and Michelet, strove to 
write their histories as picturesquely as Scott 
had written his novels. And the novels even 
when not historical imitated the novels of 
Scott in the breadth, the social contrasts, the 
ample and highly coloured setting, with which 
they represented the manners of their own age. 
Some fifty years later, the yearly " output' ' 
of novels began once again to increase, at first 
slowly, then with steady progress, and then 
with a triumphant and startling leap ahead. 
The approximate figures illustrating this ad- 
vance to leadership between 1870 and 1880, and 
the even more striking increase since then 
have already been given. The annual num- 

6 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

ber of religious works remains pretty constant ; 
that of scientific and historical and social 
works increases almost to an equality with 
them; but fiction remains far in the lead. The 
influence of the war, indeed, has cut down the 
novels as it has other luxuries, — from 1226 in 
1913 to 1014 in 1914, and to 755 in 1918; but 
it has not yet brought fiction to the level of 
serious subjects. The novel still is dominant. 
The causes of the second great increase in 
the yearly product of British prose fiction are 
associated with the general progress of indus- 
trial democracy: cheapened processes of me- 
chanical reproduction, the diffusion of an ele- 
mentary education, the increased leisure of 
hand workers and small merchants, diminished 
seriousness. In part at least, the popular 
novel is created to satisfy the demand for an 
inexpensive slothful entertainment, requiring 
no activity of the body, no energy of the rea- 
son, and small effort of the imagination. 
Novels are obviously easier than croquet, or 
than bridge. They are easier than poetry be- 
cause the novel reader does not have to create 
an imaginary world very different from the 
actuality about him. The only thing easier 
than the novel is the "movies." Again, the 



THE ART OP THE NOVELIST 

progress of manufacture cheapens everything, 
including books. Novels are reproduced inex- 
pensively, like other works of art: carpets, 
musical records, half-tones, mechanical wood 
carvings, and plaster casts. Most people can 
buy novels, and those who cannot buy them can 
borrow them from the public library. In addi- 
tion, everybody now learns to read and write; 
and a "reading public" has been created. 
This is not an educated public, not a public 
trained to give energetic, continuous attention 
to serious ideas, or disciplined in taste by 
acquaintance with creations of high literary 
quality, but a public energetically devoted to 
practical affairs and material comfort, decent, 
bustling, and superficial. The reading matter 
of such a public must be fit for the minds of 
the readers. When Addison, two hundred 
years ago, rejoiced that he had brought phi- 
losophy from "closets and libraries to tea- 
tables and coffee-houses," he might have 
added that it was a tea-table and coffee-house 
philosophy which he had brought. The philos- 
ophy of hard thinking remained the occupation 
of the lonely scholar; it abode in "closets and 
libraries." Two generations later Dr. John- 
son remarked on the existence of the "middle 

8 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

class of scholars, who read for amusement," as 
a comparatively new fact in English history. 
These "middle scholars/' the "general read- 
ers," constituted the public addressed through 
the publisher, and their purchases of books 
made the writing of books a possible means of 
livelihood for a small body of men of letters. 
Never before the eighteenth century had this 
been the case. The honoraria of individual 
patrons had supported poets; a share of the 
entrance fees to the playhouse had rewarded 
playwrights, sometimes munificently; political 
preferments and pensions had been freely 
granted to party writers; and some journalists 
of all work like 1 'Estrange and Defoe had 
made a living by their pens; but not till the 
time of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Smollett does 
literature as a business emerge . in definite 
shape from the limbo of formlessness. In this 
day not alone the "middle," but the "lower" 
scholars are addressed in print, still less 
capable than Addison's "fair sex," or John- 
son's Myrtilla of steady thought, or of delicate 
reserves, and too often dulled by the habitual 
over-emphasis of headline and cartoon, of 
rapid reel pictures, and of big print and capi- 
tals in newspaper editorials. The reading 

9 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

public of the day, moreover, is not so serious 
as the reading public of a hundred, or of fifty 
years ago. It does not live, as readers used to 
live, under the influence of a grave theology, — 
or of any theology. It reads for entertain- 
ment; and if the book does not provide enter- 
tainment, there are plenty of forms of super- 
ficial gaiety to take its place. Finally, a 
very large proportion of general readers are 
young; — juvenile though not children, and im- 
mature in mind and experience. It is a remark 
of Mr. Leland T. Powers, the well-known pub- 
lic reader, that all audiences are sixteen years 
old. Nearly the same thing may be said of 
the mixed public which reads for entertain- 
ment. 

Market novels, however, are not of so much 
interest to the student of literature as of 
sociology; they are the creation of business, 
not of art; made to meet a demand, not to re- 
veal a vision. "Let us not spend words upon 
them, but do thou look, and pass on" — pass to 
the greater novels, the most ample expression 
of the modern spirit in letters. The novel has 
been the chosen form of expression for the 
highest literary genius manifested in Russia 
during the nineteenth century; in this form has 

10 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

spoken genius as high as any displayed in Eng- 
land or France; and in all these countries and 
Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Scandinavian 
countries the novel has occupied a throng of 
men endowed with brilliant talents and only 
next in achievement to the great creators of 
the first rank. How different would the nine- 
teenth century be without Scott and Dickens, 
Balzac and Hugo, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. 

One reason for the popularity of the novel 
is that it is a loose and flexible form of litera- 
ture, — that its field has no definite boundaries, 
so that one steps easily into drama, history, or 
romance, while yet the novel has a distinguish- 
able norm and a central tendency. 

Of the forms of art current in our own day 
the novel is most like the drama. Both tell 
stories, have to do with individuals, and give 
a view of social life. In both, the narration is 
developed by the play of character upon char- 
acter, and there is, commonly, in a novel much 
dialogue, with occasional passages as continu- 
ous as on the stage. Novels are perpetually 
turned into plays, and plays are now and then 
made into novels. Many novels of recent 
years, moreover, resemble plays more closely 
than older novels commonly do, in that they 

11 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

deal with sharply defined transactions, and 
have comparatively few characters, move rap- 
idly, and admit no digressions or episodes. 
Yet the novel and the drama essentially differ 
in spirit; or else why is the dramatized work 
of fiction nearly always a fanlty play, faulty 
in proportion as it adheres to the manner of 
its narrative original? Dickens's Tale of Two 
Cities, dramatized as The Only Way, had first 
of all to be introduced by a prologue scene, 
taking place many years before the beginning 
of the real action, and only useful to afford an 
explanation of the events which followed; and 
then, when the play really began, it had some- 
times to sprawl and sometimes to leap from 
scene to scene without clear connection and 
solid progress, mystifying all spectators except 
those who were prepared by having read the 
novel beforehand. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, 
dramatized as Becky Sharp, lost all its weight 
of slow and inevitable progress in Becky's life, 
by becoming dramatically sharp and rapid; 
and in the climax scene, the most famous stroke 
of Thackeray's genius, — that by which Becky 
is made for once to admire her husband when 
he strikes down Lord Steyne, — was inevitably 
lost upon the audience, being too intimate and 

12 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

too psychological to be represented on the 
stage. Scott's novels, one by one, Dickens's 
novels, one by one, were adapted to the 
theatre in their day. The novels are still 
read; Oliver" Twist has been successfully 
"picturized"; but who hears of the play of 
Bob Roy? 

Even sharply defined dramatic novels ordi- 
narily lack the obvious and striking external 
action requisite for clearness on the stage. 
Even Miss Austen's brilliant high social com- 
edy in Pride and Prejudice, or Trollope's bold 
humour in Barchester Towers would never do ; 
not even Elizabeth though she routs Lady de 
Bourgh so gallantly, or Mrs. Proudie though 
she calls so grandly on Mr. Stanhope to "Un- 
hand it, Sir I " is quite a theatrical figure. 

On the whole, the typical, the characteristic 
novel is on a broader scale and covers an 
ampler field than the play. It tolerates a slow- 
ness of movement, a fulness of detail, a com- 
pleteness of explanation, a psychological fine- 
ness, a subtlety and delicacy of effect and a 
distribution of emphasis, which are at least not 
normal on the stage. 

Of older types of creative literature the 
novel most clearly approaches the epic. The 

13 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

epic tells an ample story about a large transac- 
tion, with a throng of actors in a spacious 
world. It is the panorama of a whole society; 
and though it has its main hero and its cen- 
tral plot, it is tolerant of episodes, and reaches 
no single or central climax. So there is an 
epic novel, easy, generous, which tells a single 
story about a single hero, but sees him against 
an extensive background of various life, and 
reaches more than one climax of interest. 
Such are Tom Jones, Middlemarcli, and Henry 
Esmond. Yet though near akin to the epic — 
and the resemblances have been merely sug- 
gested — the novel has its own field. It is in 
prose, not in verse; and it is accordingly 
prosaic. That is, the novel has less exaltation 
and intensity than the epic; it deals with 
ordinary men, not with heroes, it is relatively 
diffuse, and more freely admits humour ; — in its 
incidents, in its characters, and in its style. 
The "mere English' ' reader accustomed to 
prose translations of the Iliad and Beowulf 
may not easily feel the difference between the 
tone and style of verse and prose in the epic; 
but nothing critical can be more certain than 
that the epic narrative loses an essential part 
of its lofty and tragic tone, and degenerates 

14 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

toward a mere romance by exchanging the 
orderly form and the energy of verse for the 
relative looseness and tameness of prose. 

But the novel comes closer to real life than 
the epic, or even than the realistic drama. The 
epic cannot abandon its monarchs and out- 
stretched heroes, and record fully the chaff of 
a group of street labourers ; its home is in the 
great days of old, and it cannot live in today, 
in the lodging-house of Mme. Vauquer, or Mrs. 
Todgers, or Hilda Lessways. As for the 
drama, it must be instant in effect, continually 
in motion, and obvious. Not all human situa- 
tions have these qualities in a degree sufficient 
to make them effective on the stage. Students 
of stagecraft, both theorists and practical 
playwrights, remark on the small number of 
possible dramatic situations. Mr. Bernard 
Shaw is believed to be very original, but he 
declares that his whole dramatic craftsmanship 
consists in dressing up old situations anew. 
This disclaimer may be one of his whims, his 
paradoxes. But M. George Polti, in his little 
book, Les t rente-six situations dramatiques, 
found it difficult to rediscover the "thirty-six 
tragic situations " declared by Gozzi to exist, and 
only succeeded in reaching the number by split- 

15 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

ting up some categories. Schiller worked hard 
to find more but could not discover so many. 
No doubt it is only in the bare formula that 
dramatic situations are alike, and no doubt a 
relatively few formulas would cover the plan 
of most novels. Yet the novel is less restricted 
than the stage; it may be slower, more in- 
timate, and more subtle. In addition, it is 
freer in its point of view than the drama, be- 
cause it need not so scrupulously consider pre- 
possessions, national or other. If a man does 
not like a novel, he need not read it ; somebody 
else may. But at the play, an outraged 
minority are likely to raise a row and spoil a 
performance. From an outraged majority 
there is no appeal. Then the novel approaches 
history: the record of the actual. Some 
novelists believe they are striving to repro- 
duce it raw; they speak of a slice of life; some- 
times a slice of quivering life. They operate; 
they vivisect. Again, some novels are de- 
signed to make the reader feel as if he were 
actually watching the confusing procession of 
many people through a large world. Tolstoy 
purposes in War and Peace to give the vast 
impression of the Napoleonic War in Russia; 
Zola sees all Rome and strives to represent 

16 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

whole generations of French life in his gigantic 
kinetoscope. 

Yet in even these novels the central interest 
is not in the continued activity of a group or 
organization of human beings, as that of history 
is, — not in the life of a country, or a church, 
or a corporation, — but of individuals. A mere 
piece of fictitious history would be no novel. 
There are such — as the Adventures of a Cava- 
lier — and it is recorded that the tale deceived 
Lord Chatham. He was not gratified to think 
that he had been under the spell of a clever 
writer of fiction, but angered at being deceived 
by a trick. 

The novel, so far as it approaches the 
actual, is rather a biography than a history. 
As a merely fictitious biography it has been 
conceived by Defoe, who wrote works so full 
of natural detail, often trivial, that they pro- 
duce the impression of being a transcript of 
events. .But less ideal than poetry, less sys- 
tematically patterned than a play, the novel is 
yet in spirit nearer to them than to a mere 
literal illusion of fact. A book published dur- 
ing the Spanish- American War of 1898 placed 
its hero on a transport ship of the United 
States, which pursued a very erratic course, — 

17 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

touching at Honolulu, blown by storms to 
Vladivostok, breaking down and taking refuge 
in Yokohama. The narrative was accompanied 
by pseudo-documents, and had little or noth- 
ing of plot ; it was ingenious, made up by study 
and labour, not by the imagination, to seem a 
record of fact. It was an annoying trick. But 
the normal novel is not a trick or deceit; it is 
a creation. Like other imaginative creations, 
it is real within its world, but that is not the 
world of actual events. As when we watch the 
play of Lear, we feel terror, wrath, grief, and 
pity, and yet we do not intervene to prevent the 
outrages which occur in this mimic world, 
knowing well that a fateful control of that 
which takes place on the stage is beyond the 
reach of our intervention, within a bounded 
world of which we are spectators but in which 
we cannot act, so when we read a novel, we 
believe in its events just as much as we do in 
the events of the play; but we know that what 
happens is created by another power than that 
of fact; we know that we are looking in upon 
a vision, however compelling a vision. Thus 
the novel, though in its nature not so far re- 
moved from actuality as a poem or a play, is 
yet removed from it. In particular, it mani- 

18 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

fests tendencies and laws of life more dis- 
tinctly realized than does actual life. Actual 
life exhibits the tendencies of character and of 
events; but it does not carry them through to 
realization; other characters and events in- 
hibit them. Thus imaginative creation is 
more " philosophical" than fact, as Aristotle 
intimates, because it rests on fundamental 
tendencies, and is thoroughgoing in carrying 
them out. As related then to the pseudo- 
biography or the pseudo-history, which pro- 
duces the illusion of reality without imagina- 
tive unity, the novel is written in the spirit of 
creative art. 

Yet here again the creative freedom of the 
novelist is limited and controlled more rigidly 
than that of any other "poet." He may not 
imagine a world frankly governed by other 
laws of nature than this one: — a world peo- 
pled by beings six inches high, or in which the 
youngest son by glowering at the ashes becomes 
fitted to go forth and win the hand of a princess 
after his elder brothers have failed. These are 
fairy tales ; on a large scale they are romances : 
that is, narratives of a world more brilliant, 
more highly coloured, or more entertainingly 
improbable than the normal world, but not 

19 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

so systematically ideal and beautiful as the 
world of high poetry. Yet the line between the 
novel and the romance is a finer one and harder 
to draw than that between the novel and the 
pretended history. The accentuation of special 
aspects of life which is essential in all fiction 
in order to give it interest easily leads to the 
securing of interest by making the laws of the 
world of the novel a little different from those 
of this world. Hence the novels of Sir Walter 
Scott have something of a romantic formula : a 
stupid well-meaning Waverley is restored to 
fortune by a mysterious packet; six healthy 
brothers die by various kinds of violent death 
in six months so that a stupid well-meaning 
Frank Osbaldistone may marry Diana Vernon. 
Likewise naughty achieving characters, — Vich 
Ian Vohr, Rob Eoy, — are given a kind of 
charm above that of common men, and the 
events of common life are presented as more 
free from monotony than they usually are. It 
is plain, however, that Scott's romantic tend- 
encies diverge from the normal course of the 
novel, that the novel, though somehow livelier 
than life, is contained within a more ordinary 
probability than the formula of Waverley or 
Ivanhoe or Rob Roy. 

20 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

But not even yet, not by recognizing the 
novel as an attempt in narrative form to sub- 
ject the creative imagination in its dealings 
with human character and experience to the 
laws of normal possibility have we considered 
the novel on all sides. The novel has to give 
room enough for the working out of a tolerably 
extended transaction, or the development of a 
character through a considerable experience, or 
the presentation of a substantial social order. 
It is not a short story. 

This is not a merely mechanical question. 
Think of any satisfactory short story, — for 
example The Black Cat. The characters are 
really formed when the story begins; the 
transaction performed is not only single, but 
relatively simple, brief, and in order to justify 
itself surprising, and for most readers none the 
worse for being fantastic. An exaggeration 
resulting from brevity, a heightened tone, 
some tension, like that of the stage, belong to 
the short story. Or in that other and more 
beautiful type, that of Turgenev, in which a 
single idyllic mood is presented, there is a 
definite elevation of tone, a lyric sentiment 
approaching poetry, and incapable of being 
extended to the scale of a novel. The genius 

21 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

of the short story writer and of the novelist 
are in essence different, and it is rarely indeed 
that a writer has excelled in both forms. 

In the novels of those who have most genu- 
inely succeeded in both novels and short stories 
there is generally a sense of effort, of an at- 
tempt to be perpetually exciting, of a tension 
above the normal ease of a large conception. 
Stevenson, for example, never outgrew the 
limits of the short story, though he was tend- 
ing away from them and Weir of Hermiston 
promises greatly. Between the novel of full 
length and the short story there are compro- 
mises, intermediate types: novelettes, often 
charming, in which the novelist's type of genius 
is at work, without exerting itself upon mate- 
rial demanding its full energy; Silas Marner 
is an example of the short novel. All of George 
Eliot's Tales of Clerical Life are of the novel- 
ist's type, not of the tale-teller's. They would 
perhaps have been better if there had been 
room in them to explain the characters. But 
Kipling's Kim, on the other hand, is a series 
of short stories, — finely cut gems strung by an 
expert jeweler on a single thread. 

The typical novel, then, is a tolerably long 
piece of narrative prose fiction dealing in the 

22 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

spirit of creative art with the fortunes of in- 
dividual persons in the normal world. At 
every point it may tend to pass its boundaries, 
and to annex the territory of other forms; — 
to grow crisp, or to become impressionistic, or 
to rise to idealism, or to get high-coloured, or 
to preach, or to lose accent and vivacity, but in 
so far as it does any of these things, it departs 
from the normal tendency of the novel as a 
type. 

The most important fact about it is that it 
tells an imagined story, like the romance, the 
drama, and the epic; and its relations with 
these other forms of imaginative literature are 
the most illuminating aspects of the novel for 
us to consider. 

The novel, the epic of common life, the fic- 
tion in which the imagination creates charac- 
ters but accepts the world in which they live, 
is a creation of modern times, approached in 
France, Spain, and Germany in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, foreshadowed in 
Italy still earlier, but first definitely formed in 
England during the eighteenth century. In its 
modernness, the novel is unique among consid- 
erable literary types. The Greeks, who dis- 
covered the intellectual life, discovered and 

23 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

brought to classical perfection nearly all forms 
of prose and verse. Epic poetry, tragedy and 
comedy, lyric and elegy, epigram and idyl, his- 
tory and oratory, philosophy and criticism; — 
why should the Greeks have missed inventing 
novels? Homer and Sophocles and Demos- 
thenes are read in school and college. Even 
those who read no Greek, and perhaps know 
no more than the names of a few Attic writers 
accept the conventions and follow the ideals of 
style which succeeded in establishing them- 
selves in Athens some centuries before the be- 
ginning of the Christian era. Why is there no 
Greek novelist? For the Greek romances of 
the decadence, however interesting to the stu- 
dent of fiction, are not entitled to the name, 
and have their origin in a different kind of 
interest. Likewise the stories which have 
reached us from ancient Egypt, the tales of 
Eoman decadence, the fiction of Arabia and 
India and mediaeval Europe are not novels in 
form or akin to novels in spirit. Their chief 
delight is in pure marvel, in the escape from 
probability; not in this world but in an in- 
vented world. The range, on the other hand, 
of the brief realistic tales of gross humour, such 
as the French fabliaux, is too narrow, the ideas 

24 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

are too conventional, to suggest the free 
imaginative working upon life of the novelist's 
mind. 

For the existence of the novel certain condi- 
tions, material and moral, had to be fulfilled, 
and they never were fulfilled until modern 
times. The novel depends for its support upon 
a large public; it could never have been 
brought into being at the command of an indi- 
vidual patron, or to gratify the interest of a 
narrowly limited circle of readers. Now, for 
the existence of a large body of readers, the 
habit of reading must be widespread in the 
community, and books must be cheaply repro- 
duced. An illiterate public may listen to 
poetry or to brief prose tales, or may enjoy 
dramatic performances, but it cannot be 
reached by novels. This prime condition was 
attained only for a relatively short time before 
the modern era. Books were comparatively 
cheap and reading in either Greek or Latin 
was common throughout the Roman Empire; 
but no such vast body of readers could have 
existed as has been made possible by printing, 
and by the spread of elementary education in 
modern times. But more important are what 
may be called the moral conditions. There 

25 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

must be not only a tolerably large public able 
to read novels and a cheap supply of books; 
but the public must be interested in novels and 
hence ready to buy them and support the 
novelist. To this end the public must be 
capable of feeling an interest in the fictitious 
picture of life on this earth. They will not 
do this if they are engrossed with the thoughts 
of another world. Puritans and monks are not 
interested in novels. The influence of religious 
prejudices against novels has been felt, though 
less and less strongly, throughout the English 
speaking world, and is felt even now in remote 
corners of America among certain extreme re- 
ligious sects. Just as the theatre — and indeed 
all imaginative literature — has been looked at 
with eyes of doubt by moralists of the most 
ancient times, — by Plato and Plutarch, by the 
Presbyterian Prynne, the High Churchman 
Collier, the Methodist Wesley, so the novel has 
been from its creation under the ban of re- 
ligious condemnation. It is a mundane form 
of literature and appeals to a mundane spirit. 
Again it cannot be the case that the very 
poor and wretched shall be interested in the 
imaginative picture of daily life. For them, 
the value of letters will be to provide an escape 

26 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

from common life, from its pain and constraint 
and tedium, to a more beautiful or a more 
amusing world. The Italian peasant when he 
reads at all, reads from little rough books in 
clumsy type the tales of Charlemagne and his 
paladins. Kings and princes, again, when 
they are not as nowadays under the constraint 
of middle-class fashions, demand a literature 
of flattery and show — the masques of Ben 
Jonson, the monarchist plays of Corneille, the 
epic celebrating their ancestors. The novel 
appeals to those who are set neither too high 
nor too low, who have leisure to enjoy, but who 
have also a daily business, who have duties and 
active relations in the give-and-take of men of 
ordinary affairs. 

Average life cannot be interesting unless it 
is various; and this cannot be unless the 
average man has the choice of a variety of 
careers. A fixed type of society, constraining 
each of its members within a narrow field of 
experience, cannot offer to the imagination 
sufficiently free play in the creation of char- 
acter, is not rich enough, to be interesting. 
The types of chivalry, of mediaeval religious 
aspirations, were too few, and the choice be- 
tween them was not open at all, or was made 

27 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

too early in life for a drama of character to 
arise with reference to them. The same thing 
is true even of the New Comedy of Athens, so 
far as we can judge of it ; its range of incident 
was narrow and conventional. A customary 
society, one in which occupation and hence in 
which the general prepossessions of men's 
minds are determined by status — by birth — is 
less interesting and dramatic than one in which 
choice enters, in which to some degree the pro- 
verbial phrase holds good: "la carriere ouverte 
aux talents." Modern industrial society, in 
which there is a myriad of occupations, each 
denning a spirit, an approach to life, creating 
a type, and yet retaining a common equality 
and a human self-respect, so that there may be 
sufficient intelligent interminglings among the 
members of socio-economic groups for one 
group to react on another freely, is more pic- 
turesque, more full of stimulating contrast, 
than Homer's world, or Menander's, or than 
even that diversified nine-and-twenty in a com- 
pany which set out from Canterbury in fair 
mid- April. " Doctor, lawyer, merchant," com- 
mercial traveller, engineer of a hundred varie- 
ties; minister of more than a hundred; citizen 
of Singapore, Eeykjavik, Cuzco, London; globe- 

28 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

trotter ; dweller on a back street, or an avenue, 
or in the mountains; East or West, the novel 
freely accepts all types, nay, rejoices in them, 
and rejoices also in the individual differ ences 
of men as well as in their typical character, 
and their fundamental humanity. A relatively 
free and various social order is essential to the 
existence of the novel, and the fixity of social 
standing, the establishment of castes, any feu- 
dalisms, open or veiled, such as underlay all 
antiquity and the whole of the Middle Ages, 
does not allow free course for imaginative sym- 
pathy, humorous or tragic, within the bounds 
of normal reality. 

Meredith in his Essay on Comedy insists on 
freedom in the relations of the sexes, a condi- 
tion of society in which the freedom of choice 
on both sides and frank companionship are 
possible, as essential to the rationally humor- 
ous criticism of life which is the living spirit 
of his fiction. On the other hand, it is the 
thwarted or oppressed individuality of women 
more than the unhappy fate of men which gen- 
erates the tragic novel of Eichardson, of 
George Eliot, and of Thomas Hardy; and in a 
society in which the domestic comedy and the 
domestic tragedy of the ordinary life of women 

29 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

was not various and interesting a novel, if it 
existed, would be very different from the novel 
as we know it. But poetry has never been 
without heroines; and it may be a question 
whether the women of literature are on the 
whole not even more varied, rich, and complex 
in character than the men. The two sexes 
have stood side by side in interesting compan- 
ionship or conflict since the beginning of days : 
even in the Hiad the most interesting charac- 
ters, because the most complicated, are women 
or goddesses. The equality of the sexes in 
psychological variousness and moral dignity 
has always been practically recognized by the 
poets; it is only theorists who have denied it. 
Pope is guilty of the silly affirmation that most 
women have no character, but he was only 
trying to be smart. Never has a great im- 
aginative genius created or human history 
exhibited interesting manhood without inter- 
esting womanhood. The creator of Siegfried 
made Brunhilde, of Achilles Helen, of (Edipus 
Antigone, of Beowulf Thrytho, of the Knight 
the Wife of Bath and Cressida. Where there 
was Pericles there was Aspasia, where Alfred 
the Lady of Mercia, where Nicephorus Theo- 
phano, where Gunnar Ragnhild. We may 

30 



THE NOVEL IN MODERN LIFE 

therefore be sure that if the order of things 
encourages the sense of the individuality of 
men, makes the ordinary life of ordinary men 
an object of imaginative interest, the sense of 
individuality in women will likewise be encour- 
aged, and the ordinary life of ordinary women 
will not fail to excite imaginative contempla- 
tion. In the largest view, then, the "feminist" 
movement, however obvious it is in modern 
fiction, is but one aspect of a larger economic 
and social movement, is not a primary cause 
for the existence of the novel, but is a fact 
affecting it. 

The novel, then, came late because it is the 
expression of conditions and of ideas which 
had no existence until modern times. It is the 
most free, the most flexible, the most various 
form of literature; it offers the highest possi- 
bility for the exhibition of character independ- 
ent of circumstance, and thus it exalts the 
worth of the individual human soul. It offers 
the freest play for the humorous observation 
of the eccentricities of life and the panorama 
of society. Thus it may offer the most tonic 
and bracing of social philosophies. It gives 
the opportunity of a minutely accurate psy- 
chological truth; it may be the most scientific 

31 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

of imaginative writing. More than any verse, 
it may feel social wrong and grief: and so 
more profoundly than any poet the novelist 
has revealed 

" Sorrow barrieadoed evermore 
"Within the walls of cities/' 

So far is the novel from being an exhausted 
or a decadent type, that considering the social 
conditions which have created it, and the pros- 
pect as to social conditions in the future, we 
may be sure that whether the present order 
of society is stable or is destined to lead on to 
new forms, novels are sure to be written, that 
there will be a place for the social prose epic 
on an ample scale, humorous, tragic, pathetic, 
or philosophic. 



32 



CHAPTER n 

THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

A good novel, — a novel which does more than 
spread sails to catch the passing breeze of 
popular interest, — has at least two vital quali- 
ties. These are its imagination and its union 
of individual difference with general proba- 
bility. In an unr effective way, people think of 
the imagination merely as the power of ex- 
traordinary invention. But the height of 
imagination is not manifested by the power to 
move naturally in a fantastic world, whether 
with Beckford or Mrs. Radcliffe or Maeter- 
linck or Poe, — a world of one-eyed calen- 
dars and djinns, or vague alarming pres- 
ences and midnight groans, or faint wraiths 
in blue air. Still less is imagination limited 
to the power of creating an ingenious and 
exciting improbability, the faculty of Cut- 
cliffe-Hyne or Dumas or Dr. Cyrus Town- 
send Brady, in which insoluble mysteries are 
solved by imperturbable superhuman detec- 

33 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

tives, or insuperable obstacles are overcome by- 
loyal gentlemen of great simplicity, or heroines 
of rubbery elasticity escape six times a week 
from inevitable disaster. By imagination I 
mean the image-making power, — the power of 
illusion without hallucination, — the power of 
consciously seeing with the mind's eye, hearing 
with the mental ear, weighing, feeling, appre- 
hending by every sense beings never perceived 
except by the mind, as if they were objectively 
perceived or remembered. 

Take two men considering a physical prob- 
lem, — two contractors looking over the plans of 
a house, or two civil engineers considering a 
preliminary location. One " catches the idea," 
apprehends the contour of the ground as a 
whole, can follow the road and go in and out 
of the rooms. The other sees nothing but 
specifications and estimates, and reckons the 
entire problem as an analytic piece of reason- 
ing, with no vision except of the figures at the 
point of his pencil. The first has imagination, 
and the more vigorous his imagination the 
more nearly his preliminary solution of the 
problem approaches to reality. Imagination 
is not the power of creating that which is un- 
like normal experience; on the contrary, it is 

34 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

the power of creating that which is like normal 
life under the law of being of the thing 
imagined. As the imaginative mechanic sees 
that which may be made actual before it exists, 
the imaginative novelist perceives that which 
might be made actual if one could build a life. 
Mrs. Sarah Fraser Tytler one day happened 
to be going upstairs in a French apartment- 
house. Through an open door she caught sight 
for an instant of a French Protestant family 
at their evening meal ; and her imagination set 
at work by the impressions of the moment 
created a narrative with its setting in the small 
circle of French Protestantism, — a narrative 
the incontestable veracity of which has been 
the subject of wondering praise. Hers was the 
novelist's imagination. It seems to me, on the 
other hand, though I say it with diffidence, that 
the poet Gray and the novelist Black mani- 
fested a lack of imagination when they strove 
to fix the precise epithet for what they saw 
"on the spot," in the actual disturbing pres- 
ence of the veritable fact, not made over by 
the force of their own nature. Novels, even 
novels of a certain merit, may be made by the 
clever compiling of observations, instead of 
creatively, from an inner energy. The novels 

35 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

of Lord Beaconsfield are made in this way. 
His characters are actual acquaintances whom 
he has met, or personages about whom he read 
and of whom he heard anecdotes. He repeats 
their ideas, reports their accents, notes and 
records their eye-glasses, their poses, their 
ways of dressing their hair, but never under- 
stands them, never enters their hearts and 
makes them act in a new situation, as they 
would have done but never did. The earlier 
work of Alphonse Daudet, in The Nabob, and 
parts of Norris's The Pit, impress me as built 
up in part though not wholly in the same way, 
as not sufficiently created anew in the author's 
own mind. 

Imagination is above all manifested by its 
power to harmonize discordances. A high 
imagination subdues the most various and most 
incongruous materials to a single though com- 
plicated order. This harmony or order comes 
from the author's mind. His nature is one; 
what passes through his mind is shaped, col- 
oured, brought into unity. The diversity of his 
experience and observation is inevitably in 
some sort harmonized by the working of his 
nature. Thus in Shakespeare's tragedies, the 
humorous parts are in contrast with the seri- 

36 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

ons parts, but are, at the same time, congruous 
with them. The hysterical tenderness of the 
humour in Lear is congruous with Lear's 
tragedy of the affections ; the grotesqueness 
and verbal ingenuity of the humour in Hamlet 
are congruous with the prince's irony and 
dialectic play of mind. And in the harmony 
of these apparent discords the power of 
Shakespeare's imagination is manifested. So 
the keen worldliness and the genial simplicity 
of Tom Jones, Elf ride's courage on the head- 
land and her timidity about her early love- 
affair in A Pair of Blue Eyes, the ferocity and 
good nature of Taras Bulla are harmonious. 
On the other hand, the death of Maggie and 
Tom in The Mill on the Floss, and the mar- 
riage of Adam Bede and Dinah Morris are out 
of tone. The death, though possible, indeed 
not even extraordinary, is in reality only a way 
of escape for the novelist from answering the 
inevitable questions about Maggie's adjust- 
ment to life raised by the narrative. The 
marriage is designed to inculcate a doctrine of 
making the best of the second-best dear to the 
author but not grounded in the novel. These 
endings follow upon nothing in the stories 
which precede them. They are not imagined 

37 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

but willed; and though they cannot be said to 
violate logic, they are alien to the temper of 
the books in which they appear. 

Or again the disharmony may be a lack of 
evenness in the "texture" of the novel: a rela- 
tive thinness and inadequacy of detail in parts. 
Trollope's John Bold is not substantial enough 
to sustain his position in the beautiful story of 
The Warden. Is it too much to say that Field- 
ing's Blifil is inadequate to the part he plays 
in Tom Jones because he is too lightly and 
mechanically outlined to be Tom's rival? In 
spite of myself I am impressed in the same 
way by most of the secondary characters in 
Diana of the Crossways; they are not vigorous 
enough to hold their own with Diana. They 
are natural, but they lack colour and solidity. 

It is the accuracy and significance of the de- 
tails by which the defmiteness of the imagina- 
tive power is shown. The imaginative writer 
sees his group of people in space and hears 
their voices. He understands their philosophy 
and notices their buttons. He finds their char- 
acters exhibited in casual deeds and trivial 
words. When Dmitri Karamazov, under the 
charge of having murdered his father, is 
stripped by the police officers of his bloody 

38 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

clothes and wrapped in a quilt, lie is not at the 
moment so much concerned with the charge 
against him as ashamed to have his feet seen, 
" especially the coarse, flat, crooked nail on his 
right great toe." And when he is compelled 
to dress in another man's clothes, he loses his 
temper, and feels disgraced. 

Such things are dropped from the pen 
casually, as it would seem, but they tell. The 
conversations of the imagined characters do 
not sound like the only ones they ever had, 
and the things they do in the novel are not the 
only ones they ever did. There is a great deal 
more out of sight which the imaginative writer 
might have told, but had no room for. It is of 
course in the congruity of character with itself 
that the imaginative power of creating har- 
mony is most plainly manifested. The char- 
acter created for the plot, by the will, is almost 
obliged to contradict itself. It is often at bot- 
tom a contradiction. Such, for example, as Sir 
Leslie Stephen suggested, are Defoe's crim- 
inals. They are fully and adequately studied 
by Defoe, who knew jail-birds by personal 
acquaintance and pirates by diligent study of 
geography and criminal records, but they are 
not created anew by any imaginative sympathy ; 

39 






THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

and hence they are mere merchants engaged 
in crime, pursuing the business of murder and 
brigandage on the high seas with a petty ac- 
countant's calculations of profit and loss; send- 
ing their ill-gotten gains home to their sisters, 
retiring in middle-age to respectability, and 
ending their days as churchwardens in their 
native villages. These beings are not imagined; 
they are all Defoe in the pirate business; but' 
Defoe could not have been in the pirate busi- 
ness, not because his conscience would not let 
him, but because his nature and education had 
not qualified him to take in what it meant to be 
a pirate. These characters are impossible 
from the first, had never imaginative life. 
Such, as Henry James says, are Dickens's 
characters made to tell a story round or to 
move a story along: Cheeryble Brothers, 
Oliver Twists, beings whose natures radically 
contradict the conditions under which they 
live, or by which they are supposed to have 
been formed. 

Sometimes characters suffer violence from 
the will of the author by sudden contradictions 
of their nature introduced to satisfy the plot. 
A hard man of business who has as a young 
man resigned from the United States Navy, 

40 



THE SO.UECES OF INTEREST 

and expatriated himself because he cannot 
really regard his country as a nation is sud- 
denly touched by his daughter's devotion to 
the flag, renounces the English peerage he 
has attained, and goes "home" to America 
to serve his true country in its exigency. In 
Ursule Mirouet a hard-hearted old skeptical 
doctor is converted by the lily-like, hot- 
house piety of his niece; in Eugenie Grandet 
Eugenie violates her own sweet and virginal 
nature to make a dramatic point in a letter. In 
these instances the lack of unity of character 
is due to a lack of continuous imaginative reali- 
zation of it, to an uncertain grip of the author's 
mind upon his subject. 

The imaginative writer surprises us, or it 
may be shocks us by what he has discovered 
that his characters did; but we cannot doubt 
his veracity. He is not satisfied even by a 
sound logic as to the consistency of his char- 
acters. He knows them, and hence he is ready 
to be startled by them. Henry Esmond burn- 
ing his mother's marriage-certificate, Hen- 
chard tying up one arm before he fights Far- 
frae, Eoy Bichmond leaping from his pose as a 
statue to embrace his son, these and a hundred 
more incidents great or little are the work of 

41 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

the imagination, reconciling the strange and 
the natural in harmonious unity. 

The imagination creates works which are not 
only harmonious in tone and consistent in inner 
relations, but so proportioned and emphasized 
as to produce the effect of unity. Unimagina- 
tive invention tends to a staccato over- 
emphasis of parts and thus to " spottiness'' in 
the total effect. The novel of observation is 
likely to be a set of exaggerated anecdotes, like 
Smollett's Roderick Random. Dickens mani- 
fests the same tendency after he begins to ex- 
haust the force of his first great excitement, 
and writes with acquired skill but not with 
natural delight. In Our Mutual Friend there 
is no centre; Boffin and Wegg and Bella and 
the rest make up a group of unreconciled eccen- 
tricities, mechanically assembled about the one 
ingeniously contrived but wholly mechanical 
mystery with which they have no inward and 
natural relation. Each stumps or languishes 
or grins his part, but in each picture in which 
the characters are grouped, and in the entire 
novel there is no relief to the perpetually 
underlined or over-ingenious farce. How dif- 
ferent is even David Copperfield, which though 
not one in any mechanical way, is harmonious 

42 



THE SOUECES OF INTEREST 

in the tone of its half-dozen stories, and in each 
one of them brings all the events and the most 
incongruous characters into unforced relation- 
ship, failing in places as where Micawber's 
rehabilitation in Australia is devised, not im- 
agined, yet constituting a whole, not per- 
petually and harshly crying out for attention 
to each extraordinary incident. 

In the perfect work never to be made by man 
the imaginative force has been so great, and 
the obedience to it so complete that the realiza- 
tion of the fictitious world within the author's 
mind is absolute; — complete and harmonious 
as a whole and vivid and definite in all its 
parts ; having the variety, the energy, the unity, 
the movement of a living organism. This is 
what Henry James means by saturation: the 
author is saturated with his idea when it has 
absolutely fulfilled itself to its uttermost con- 
sequence, not of detached arithmetical logic, 
but of imagined vital inevitability, within his 
mind. His characters are live beings, not 
facts analysed under a law of necessity, are 
complete, with hopes, and faces, and hands, 
and hatbands; and their world is complete, 
with its sounds and colour ; its manners, inhibi- 
tions, preconceptions, and mores; and their 

43 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

actions are complete to their end; and the 
whole story undulates, darkens, lightens, pro- 
gresses, like reality. The greatest men ap- 
proach to this completeness, Balzac or Tolstoy 
dominates us, makes his dream for a time our 
reality. But even these men are not absolute 
nature, and even they cannot always give us 
the strength of unbroken flawless reality. 
Somewhere there is always an inadequacy, a 
little corner of the mind not ' ' saturated. ' ' The 
vision is intermittent, as when Scott's Helen 
Macgregor or Dickens's Rosa Dartle declaims, 
as when Balzac's ladies utter vulgarisms, or 
Tom Jones takes Lady Bellaston's money. 
The vision is shaken and changes; the mind 
cannot hold it persistently the same. It van- 
ishes or becomes indistinct, returns, varies, 
and must be recovered. Although the imagina- 
tive vision is not created by the will or put in 
order by the analytic reason, it is yet not some- 
thing with reference to which the novelist is 
entirely a passive recipient. The attention may 
be held upon it ; by meditation it develops and 
becomes clearer, it disengages itself from 
confusion and sloughs off contradictions, it 
realizes itself. The apologue of the Dream- 
Butter which appeared years ago in the San 

44 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

Francisco Lark (of short but lofty flight) is in 
point. 

There exists a substance which is the sub- 
stratum or original of all material objects, and 
which is capable of being formed by the con- 
centration of the mind upon it into any phys- 
ical thing imagined. A man (say a real estate 
agent) buys some from a pedlar. He exercises 
his mind upon it. He hesitates for a while 
before deciding what he shall imagine, but 
decides upon a pocket-knife; visions it, raises 
the lid of the box over the dream-butter, and 
finds a jelly-like indistinct thing of a long 
elliptical shape like the sinker on a fish line. 
He thinks again and again; more and more 
intently, more and more sharply, and finally 
he makes a somewhat rough but quite usable 
pocket-knife. With practice he acquires fa- 
cility. At last he tries a house, and succeeds 
in creating a real house — solid and practicable, 
but somehow too big, too showy and uncom- 
fortable. He trades it for the little house of 
his neighbour, a poet, who strips off the super- 
fluous ornament, and with a sparing and 
thoughtful use of the dream-butter finishes the 
house consistently and is at home in it. The 
little fable may be used to inculcate a number 

45 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

of doctrines, but for the moment the important 
one is that even to make a very plain pocket- 
knife out of dream-butter requires energetic 
and long-continued concentration and direction 
of the attention, perhaps readjustment of the 
conception and its details; that the creative 
imagination in its highest form is not generally 
at work improvising, but begins by improvisa- 
tion and proceeds by meditative revision to a 
deeper and deeper insight and a more and 
more perfect revelation of itself. The result 
when realized consumes the process ; there is no 
sign of weariness or work in the finished thing. 
It is like a living being: organic, without 
marks of tooling or juncture ; complete, having 
an independent existence; at one with itself, 
satisfying its law of being. 

The primary imaginative energy is the soul 
of the work, and the meditative and conscious 
deliberation determines the completeness with 
which the work carries out the law of its being. 
Some novels are more excellent because of the 
force, originality, and vividness of the imagina- 
tion displayed in them, others because the per- 
fection with which they realize their ideal. 
Thus Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering 
creates a great many vivid figures and tells a 

46 



THE SOUECES OF INTEREST 

striking story, but it begins with exasperating 
slowness, ends with ruthless haste and im- 
probability, introduces weakening and incon- 
gruous boudoir conversations and stilted peo- 
ple. Miss Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, 
on the other hand, is as nearly a perfect 
work as human nature can create. It has what 
most critics call "the finest beginning in the 
world," ends by gratifying the raised expecta- 
tion, yet not trivially, has a distinct and inter- 
esting double plot, beautifully homogeneous 
throughout. The one important adverse com- 
ment to be made upon its technique is the 
stagnation of the plot for several chapters in 
the middle. Yet Pride and Prejudice is not so 
great a work as Guy Mannering because it 
does not create a world so genial, so interest- 
ing, with such vivid contrasts of character, with 
such strangeness made credible. 

Again the parable declares that there is a 
difference in the value of the thing imagined in 
itself, that the utmost satisfactory creation of 
one mind was a rough knife, and that it takes 
a poet to be at home in the spacious palaces of 
the imagination. No matter how vividly con- 
ceived and definitely realized, Trollope's vision 
of English cathedral towns was poorer than 

47 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

Turgenev's of the Kussian villages. The dif- 
ference is not a matter of the subject as an 
outer fact, but of the subject as an inner fact; 
each man sees with a genial largeness, or pro- 
fundity, or energy, or sweetness, or melan- 
choly, or flatness, a vision which is his alone. 
A novel to claim attention must have some- 
thing to separate it, to make it unique. The 
most vivid interest of every man is in his own 
affairs. He sees his own world in natural 
light: the grass-blade edged with flame, the 
shadowed tree-trunk rich with purplish colour 
even at the approach of dusk. The world of art 
is a painted world, a world in which the flame 
of life is but imitated; its brightest light is 
grey, its darkest shadow is grey, its richest 
colour is grey. The imaginative world must put 
in its demand upon the attention in competi- 
tion with the affair of each of us, with our own 
business : must in a different sense from Henry 
James's "compete with life." To compete it 
must be unlike life, must have a newness and 
energy such as to overcome the greater bright- 
ness and intensity of our own experience. At 
the same time it must be familiar, capable of 
being assimilated to our own natures. The 
imaginative creation, accordingly, must be at 

48 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

once exceptional and natural, — strange but 
probable, — and the novel, to realize its special 
quality, its reason for separateness, must be 
strange within the probability of an ostensibly 
normal world. The union, then, of a strange- 
ness with a closeness to nature which produces 
the effect of being very nature itself is the 
problem of the novel. 

The assumed normality of surroundings as- 
sumes a real and veritable order of society, 
actual conditions realized and realizable. It 
must be wonderful not so much in its working 
out, which is constrained within the limits of 
practical normality, but in its primary prob- 
lem. The game which it plays is under uncom- 
monly severe rules. Like every other form of 
imaginative fiction it assumes at least one im- 
possible premise: that one participant could 
have detached himself sufficiently to see all 
sides of a narrative, and to select the essential 
facts ; or that a body of letters could have been 
written so free from omissions and from re- 
dundancies as to tell a systematic story and to 
develop all the characters in it; or that there 
was an "omniscient spectator' ' who knew all 
the acts and could reveal the inner life of all 
the characters. But the premise being granted, 

49 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

the novel makes few and slight assumptions: 
does not call upon us to believe in a council of 
devils in a fine palace built with higher tech- 
nical skill than the best Beaux- Arts work, 
or to suppose that life can be symmetrized 
with thirty-six dramatic situations, or that 
human beings will speak blank verse. The 
rules of this game in strictness, then, allow 
no more " marvel,' ' no more divergence from 
the normally possible, than just enough to get 
started on, just enough to make a story. But 
so strict a game is seldom played; a few more 
admissions are required from the reader. 
Authors feel the need of being a little more 
wonderful than life, or at least than normal 
and ordinary life, in order to compete with it ; 
and as the coming into existence of the novel 
represents a step toward limiting the author's 
freedom of disport in the world of strangeness 
and deception, so the history of the novel has 
manifested a constant development, a progress 
from a greater freedom of conventions to a 
stricter and stricter method. 

In the first place, the novel, as has been inti- 
mated, tends to be even more strict than other 
types of imaginative writing in requiring the 
marvellous to be premised as a preliminary 

50 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

matter, — as a settling of conditions, constitut- 
ing a problem. This is true everywhere, in a 
way, of course ; even the marvel of the Arabian 
Nights or a fairy tale allots to certain agents, — 
godmothers, or rocs, — definite functions, and 
insists on a certain consonance of character in 
the personages of the tale. There is a kind of 
probability even in this marvel. Still more 
serious works like The Divine Comedy, or The 
Faerie Queene follow out fixed and statable 
laws, are not in capricious worlds, though they 
are not in normal ones. Admitting the plan of 
salvation, and the literal precision of biblical 
references to the fall of man and to angels, and 
the soundness of Dionysius the Areopagite's 
theology, and the accuracy of the church 
fathers ' view that the heathen deities were real 
and were devils, Paradise Lost strives to solve 
its (impossible) problem with consistent ra- 
tionality; and it does wonderfully well what 
cannot be done. These works admit their 
marvel as a datum and solve it in terms of 
orderly remarkableness. So in the novel, its 
elements of marvel enter as the data of a 
problem set at the beginning, and the solution 
is as strictly probable as the art and imagina- 
tion of the writer can make it. Moreover, the 

51 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

very introduction of the marvel itself must be 
disguised; it must be insinuated, led into, so as 
to avoid shocking modern scepticism and in- 
credulity. 

Defoe, for example, gains for his very com- 
monplace hero Robinson Crusoe the distinction 
of strangeness by the accident of casting him 
away after many adventures upon a desert 
island. The loneliness, the danger, the tropic 
growths of the island are sufficient by their 
strangeness to support the detailed homeliness 
of the incident and the lack of distinction in 
the character. On the desert island Robinson 
Crusoe's pitiful clumsy pots are pathetically 
exciting and the footstep in the sand is an ob- 
ject of tragic dread. At home in Hull his 
dishes would be like anybody else's; and who 
would care about one among millions of foot? 
prints on a London pavement on a wet day? 
But the story has lost ground as years have 
gone by, because we are better acquainted 
than Defoe's contemporaries with the real 
character of primitive life. Even children 
nowadays know that there was a Stone Age, 
and that Robinson Crusoe compared with a 
savage was rich with the stores which he car- 
ried from the wreck. He had the strength of 

52 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

civilization. As a seven-year-old friend said 
to me, on coming back from an Indian camp, 
Robinson had everything; he had iron 
tools. Persons a little older refuse to ad- 
mit that it was psychologically possible 
for a man to live alone so many years with- 
out becoming lower than a savage, — " losing 
the power of speech and having to make a 
fire by rubbing sticks together." In other 
words, the domain of rational probability has 
extended to the criticism of even the unin- 
habited island. In the Journal of the Plague 
Year, again, Defoe creates the strangeness of 
the surroundings by an excessive abnormality 
of setting, by putting his hero alone in the 
midst of conditions which detach him from 
ordinary experience, — alone, in a plague- 
stricken city. And the marvel is still external 
to the character as before ; it affords the oppor- 
tunity to record material details with precision 
which gain their power because the circum- 
stances are strange. The person is as com- 
monplace as Robinson Crusoe, and as com- 
pletely unchanged by his experience. For the 
rest of his writings Defoe adopted a means of 
effect never given up since his day — the re- 
cording with steady precision and great com- 

53 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

pleteness the details of the life of criminals, of 
anti-social beings, — and thus gains strangeness 
with external likeness to actuality; but at the 
expense in his case of inner congruity. His 
violent means of attaining strangeness which 
shall give interest to the most ordinary of 
events and persons were of course destined to 
be soon exhausted. Subtler is the device of 
the historical novel. Write about a forgotten 
age; introduce it somewhat prosaically and 
with a certain slowness of detail, and then make 
it more full of brilliant adventure than normal 
life, while at the same time you abundantly 
document and fully drape and costume and 
elaborately present custom and social condi- 
tions. Thus the amplitude of your detail will 
gain credence for your romantic adventures, 
and your romantic tone will contribute interest 
to your apparently commonplace detail. It is 
thus that Scott and his followers — progres- 
sively abandoning the historical pretence and 
becoming more frankly adventurous — write 
romance under the name of the historical 
novel. Or place your story in a little known 
far country, with an association of strangeness, 
in the Banda Oriental, the land "of the ostrich, 
the flamingo, and the black-necked swan," 

54 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

where the grace and dignity of generons per- 
sonal courtesy shine out against public cor- 
ruption, and crime; or in the Near East, 

1 1 where the cypress and myrtle 
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime," 

or in the Far East, 

" Where there ain't no Ten Commandments." 

and strangeness of adventure will be not only 
tolerated but demanded. You may even make 
up your country, as a Zenda or a Ruritania. 
The strange things that have really occurred in 
Servia or Albania will warrant something ex- 
traordinary in an entirely new, a non-existent, 
mountain principality; and you may create a 
romance of its own special colouring, bringing 
into modern times the adventurous personal 
strenuousness which the novelist of mediaeval 
history claimed at first for his own. But in 
this strange setting, character must be simple 
and not strange. Considering the marvellous 
incidents of The Three Musketeers it is impos- 
sible for the characters to be complex, or to 
fluctuate and develop. They must be fixed, 
simple, and boldly outlined, so that they can 
be cotmted on in any thrilling crisis. In such 

55 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

stories the attention may be given to what is 
done, and very little to what the people are as 
individuals. Thus in Kipling's narratives of 
distant India the bazaar, the villages, the dogs 
of the jungle must be such as the external 
observer would see — keen of eye as he might 
be, it would not be the undercurrents of the 
soul or the uncommon incidents that he could 
present. The characters too, the native serv- 
ant, the soldier, the wandering lama, are 
typical figures, broadly representing great 
classes, externally seen. A native Indian writ- 
ing for natives would take nearly all that is 
true in Kipling for granted, as commonplace; 
he would feel little interest in Indian types, but 
would create the exceptional, the distinguished 
Indian character. 

Now all these ways of approach are mainly 
ways of giving to plots of adventure a plausi- 
bility which they would not have without them, 
ways of avoiding the crudity of the Monk, or 
Frankenstein, or Melmoth while retaining their 
strangeness. Likewise the marvel of mystery 
and the marvel of terror, are united with an 
external normality, and made tolerable by 
every means of ingenuity. If the mystery is an 
unsolved strangeness, it is built up by an ac- 

56 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

cumulating of separately possible coincidences, 
which taken altogether hint — do not assure — 
the apparent activity of supernormal powers. 
There "may be something in it"; enough to 
create an uncertain shiver; no crude definite- 
ness. So long as it is mysterious it is infi- 
nite. Each of many things might be the result 
of some normal cause ; but the reader feels that 
all could not be so. Or if the supernormal in- 
trudes — as it sometimes quite boldly does — 
into the realm of the novel, it is made credible 
by the delicacy, the almost infinite completeness 
and adequacy of its detailed realism. The 
Peau de Chagrin is bought at an ordinary curi- 
osity shop; you see the confusion of the shop 
as if you were in it; and the incidents that fol- 
low are as natural and about as complete as 
life. The object itself has the utmost common- 
ness of appearance. 

Now all these means of exciting interest by 
contributing strangeness are in a way external ; 
that is, they depend upon the event, or the ex- 
ternal surroundings in themselves. They in- 
volve a departure from the normal law of life ; 
and they are hence out of tune with the tend- 
ency to believe in the "Reign of Law"; they 
contradict science, and what is worse they wear 

57 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

out ; there was little more to be done with such 
formulas. The lonely human being on an 
uninhabited island or in a great disaster, the 
romantic adventurer who lived " sixty years 
since/ ' the ghost and the inquisitor and the 
corsair and the black cat and the ape who 
walked like a man are used up. 

The rules of the game admitting an order of 
existence more beautifully coloured or more 
adventurous than the normal make the game 
too easy for the pitcher. So a new and severe 
method is to be followed — or an old one more 
rigidly. Let us substitute for the marvel of 
romance a more internal marvel. Let us ex- 
plore experience for eccentricity and for fresh 
variety and colour. The realist presented the 
detail of normal experience with the richest 
fulness and exact credibility; even too fully at 
times because the accumulation of detail with- 
out salience became monotonous, and he discov- 
ered and more fully revealed the marvel not 
generally of normal character, but more often 
of abnormal, or at least of not entirely normal 
character within the normal world. Not George 
Eliot or Balzac or Tolstoy or Zola or Henry 
James or Flaubert or Dostoevsky or Polenz 
presents ordinary people doing ordinary things 

58 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

under ordinary conditions. Almost in spite of 
themselves, as it seems, they combine strange- 
ness with commonness — a strangeness in the 
characters of their novels with commonness in 
their appearance and surroundings. 

A superior moral force characterizes the 
personages of some. In Balzac, human beings 
scheme, hold fast to revenge, contend, but with 
a bitterness, with an intellectual tenacity and 
energy far above the capacity of average hu- 
manity, and are divided into knaves (or self- 
seekers) and fools, with a precision far from 
normal. George Eliot's leading persons, espe- 
cially her women, are steadfast, far-sighted, 
noble, deliberate, intellectually gifted, above 
the normal. The interest of Adam Bede, of 
The Mill on the Floss, of Middlemarch, would 
be nothing if the heroes and heroines were not 
supernormally good. And human beings as a 
whole are abnormally rational in her books. 
The novels of Tolstoy again deal with superior 
persons, superior in energy or talent, or ele- 
vated above the common in power and station, 
who all belong to the " aristocracy of passion- 
ate souls." Before the eyes of Zola the evil 
of the world rises in tremendous smoky visions, 
almost apocalyptic, and with vast architectural 

59 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

forms, resembling beings in a Greek tragedy in 
portentous hugeness if not in harmony of pro- 
portions. Dostoevsky deals with mental in- 
valids, with the inmates of a psychiatric insti- 
tution, with epileptics, erotomaniacs, religious 
enthusiasts, the unbalanced, those near the line, 
those who go over the line. Henry James pre- 
sents his characters not in normal relations to 
their natural surroundings, but in transplanta- 
tion, the American type in strange relation to 
a transatlantic society ; and he endows his per- 
sons with a certain unemphatic dignity and in 
them unites moral insight and even shrewdness 
with an odd naivete, — producing a combination 
which is strange, even piquant. 

The increase of this inner strangeness has 
then been accompanied by a diminution of ex- 
ternal strangeness in action and fable. In a 
novel of Henry James's, for instance, our in- 
terest is in the personages — where each of 
them is unique, unfixed, not quite predictable, 
the thing done is obviously trifling, it is a sym- 
bol of the minds of the characters. A rising 
up or a sitting down, the lifting of a finger, 
even a mere look may express a moral crisis 
of the greatest intensity; and the less extraor- 
dinary the act as a phenomenon in the outward 

60 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

world, the greater the concentration of the 
author's and of the reader's mind upon the 
moral process going on within the characters of 
the novel. 

In general, the " advanced" realists, the 
"naturalists" obtain the strangeness which 
gives distinction to their commonness from the 
study of the eccentricities, and especially the 
maladies of the soul produced (and normally 
produced) in some natures by the conditions of 
modern life, but not its normal product in most 
natures. Or else they explore special localities, 
the backwaters of society, or exotic regions, for 
the note of uncommonness, which the instinct 
of humanity demands from its fiction. 

If we strive to find authors who on the whole 
refuse even this means of sugaring or spicing 
normality, they will be few indeed. Even Jane 
Austen and Thackeray and Trollope permit 
themselves the luxury of a certain inhuman 
grotesqueness, a certain too goodness to be 
true, in their fools; — in Mr. Collins and Cap- 
tain Costigan, even in Mrs. Proudie. 

Daudet in Numa, de Maupassant in The 
Baptism do not even go so far. In Mr. 
Arnold Bennett, though there is something of 
a difference in the hard naturalism of the Five 

61 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

Towns, this difference is not after all the note, 
the feature, of his best work. These specula- 
tions might lead us to seek for the source of 
interest with such novelists in a certain depth, 
in a power to reveal above others the strange- 
ness of common things, in a revelation like 
that which Wordsworth prefigured in the 
Lyrical Ballads — an illumination of the com- 
mon things of life with a colour drawn from 
the imagination — a colour, as he intended, real 
though not external, — perceived, not attached 
by the will — and realistic, though not hard and 
external like Crabbe's or Flaubert's realism. 
Such a novel, a novel of human pity, absurdity, 
greatness, and lovableness, littleness, and nasti- 
ness all at once, or in normal proportion seems 
not yet to exist. For we do not get it from 
these writers, admirable as they are. The lack 
of strangeness with them is in so far a defect 
that they are in reality less interesting for the 
lack of it, and in no degree profounder than 
Tolstoy or Balzac, who diverge more than they 
from the normal, whose perception of strange 
personalities reveals the depths of nature 
more adequately than does their temperance. 
" Passion,' ' says Balzac, — and Zola quotes him 
with approval, — "is the source of interest: but 

62 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

passion is an excess; it is an evil." Moreover, 
passion is a part of normal life, but nothing 
but passion, a logical, complete, overwhelming 
passion, always and everywhere, — every one a 
hundredth man, — this is abnormal. 

Strangeness with probability then, a certain 
departure from the normal under normal con- 
ditions, remains as an element essential to the 
most commanding interest in the novel. This 
strangeness may be in the externals, the out- 
works, of setting or events, but has historically 
tended to be manifested more and more in the 
characters. 

And speaking broadly the exceptional in one 
aspect is ordinarily combined with the normal 
in other aspects. A far-off country or a distant 
age is made not merely credible but familiar. 
The men and things of today are seen under 
a strange light and in an alien air. If the set- 
ting is strange or the plot marvellous, the 
characters are simplified and typical ; if the set- 
ting is familiar the characters are exceptional. 
It is not altogether and always true that char- 
acter creates plot; still less that setting creates 
character. The fluctuation and movement neces- 
sary to create interest in one cannot easily be 
given to all. One or the other is the dominant 

63 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

element of the tale. But the higher achieve- 
ment of the novelist is to unite strangeness 
and normality; to make plots, setting, and 
characters interesting in themselves in that they 
excite wonder and at the same time gratify 
reason; that they astonish with their strange- 
ness and at the same instant command sym- 
pathy and intelligence by their human truth. 
This union, this harmonizing of the apparently 
contradictory, like every harmony or recon- 
ciliation of opposites is the triumph of the 
aroused imagination. It is the achievement of 
Balzac, whose creative audacity overwhelms 
the reader, and for a time makes Balzac's fan- 
tastic Paris seem the only real place on earth. 
It is the achievement of Tolstoy, who carries 
us with him into the consciousness of a man 
suffering the very pangs of dissolution or com- 
pels us to be present at the inconceivable 
tumult of battle, or of Dickens, obliging us to 
believe in the topsy-turvy impossibilities of 
Sam Weller and the Pickwick Club. The vital 
force of the novel is in the imaginative energy, 
which on the one hand grasps and realizes even 
the marvellous, sometimes even the impossible, 
and on the other hand subdues to itself the 
abundant detail of common life, and unites the 

64 



THE SOURCES OF INTEREST 

two so completely that one gives support, body, 
the command of human sympathy, the other 
life, energy, soul, the command of emotional 
elevation, united in a single indivisible union, 
an incarnation. 



65 



CHAPTER III 

THE FABLE 

Every story, of course, has three necessary ele- 
ments: something done, by somebody, under 
some conditions. The thing done, the transac- 
tion, is the fable ; or when definitely organized, 
the plot. The persons doing are characters; 
the conditions under which the thing is done 
constitute the setting. Each element may be 
the main object of the author's interest, 
dominating, or even opposing or suppressing 
the other two. So there is a healthy joy in ad- 
venture; Charles Reade and Charles Kingsley 
delight in deeds; and however vivid the char- 
acters they are mainly actors, and however full 
the setting, it is only the scenery of the stage 
on which an action goes on. Others rejoice in 
the quaint, or curious, or distinguished human 
specimen; so much if no more there is in com- 
mon with Dickens and Henry James and 
Meredith. When their people act, they act to 
manifest themselves, to exhibit their oddity or 

66 



THE FABLE 

special difference ; and the setting is important 
because it is the soil or medium in which 
peculiar types of human nature flourish. Still 
other writers care for the spirit of a peculiar 
setting; they make of their characters instru- 
ments which contribute their part, their spe- 
cial "tone colour" to the author's orchestra, 
and their plots are the things which express 
the spirit of a time and place. So it is with 
Pater; Marius the Epicurean is the expression 
of a temper, of the spirit and quality of an 
age. Mr. Maurice Hewlett or Mr. Thomas 
Hardy in their books express the sentiment 
pervading their vision of Tuscany or Wessex, 
like the light of spring or winter falling upon 
a landscape. 

There are other impulses to writing than the 
ideas of action, character, and setting; there 
are other elements constituting a work of fic- 
tion than these three, but these three alone are 
the things that must be present before the 
vision of the novelist in order to create the 
substance of a story. Apparently the most 
fundamental, certainly the most obvious of 
these three elements, is the fable or plot, — the 
thing done. Whenever anything is done there 
is in some sense a story. It may be a mere 

67 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

physical fact — rolling over a stone with a crow- 
bar. Even so simple an act begins, continues, 
and ends. A mountain range may have a story, 
recounting the work of the forces slowly 
squeezing and crumpling the solid substance of 
the earth's crust, folding the rocks like softened 
glass, in time producing convulsions and dis- 
tortions, until the great mass is lifted to its 
height, and rests in comparative quiet, while it 
is gradually worn by the winds and waters 
again to a level. So a planet has a story, 
whether it first broke off a wheeling, fiery, 
gaseous mass from a central orb, and is one 
day to come to rest forever whirling cold and 
inert; or whether it was formed by the beating 
together of a multitude of cold stones, and 
heated by their mutual pressure to incan- 
descence. And the universe has a story, parts 
of which every science is trying to tell. In 
other words the working of every force or 
group of forces through a period of^ time, from 
some recognizable beginning of their activity 
to some distant stopping place in their effects 
makes up a transaction. Now the existence of 
a force is only known, of course, as it works; 
and it works only in overcoming something. 
The measure of work is resistance. Where 

68 



THE FABLE 

there is a story there is a contest. Novels, 
being concerned with human beings and their 
fortunes, are concerned with the forces which 
human beings put forth, and which act upon 
them, and therefore are concerned with human 
contests. The prime interest of a novel may 
be in the contest of a man and an external 
material world, with "nature," as Eobinson 
Crusoe wrestles with the hard conditions of the 
island. Or it may be in contests between man 
and man, for empire, or for a girl's hand in 
marriage, as in The Master of Ballantrae Mr. 
Henry and his brother are in perpetual rivalry. 
Or it may be between a man and "Society," 
as in Polenz's Der Biittnerbauer the new order 
of German life is the enemy of Biittner. Or it 
may be between a man and hidden powers of 
nature, as in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where 
"The President of the Universe has his jest" 
with Tess. Or it may be between one part of 
a man's nature and another, as in Middle- 
march, where the impulses of Dorothea's com- 
plex character are in almost unceasing conflict 
among themselves, and where all the more 
interesting personages are indeed "proble- 
matic natures." Often, perhaps commonly, the 
contest is double or triple and includes both an 

69 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

outward and an inward struggle; weakness 
and treason within the soul conspire with foes 
without, while native strength and insight find 
beneficent forces in the outer world to aid 
them. Either side may be the active, the over- 
coming force; but contest, obvious or latent, 
there must be, or there can be no story. 

In the contests which make up the transac- 
tions of novels, the world within, — the world 
of human nature, — and the world without, — 
the world of physical nature, — come into rela- 
tion. Human beings are acted upon by events. 
Quentin Durward marries Isabella and is 
happy; Anna Karenina hurls herself beneath 
the wheels of the engine because of things 
which have happened. Again human beings 
change the outer world, as in Tono-Bungay the 
uncle's vision of the order of things with him- 
self successful in it gets realized because of his 
imaginative power of realizing the dusty and 
vulgar facts of human gullibility. Or the per- 
sonages themselves are made new by experi- 
ence, like Tito Melema and Eomola. In other 
words, the "forces" of consciousness, — the 
impulses, the imaginations, the will, — are 
forces in the world of outer fact, as the world 
without exercises a force upon the mind— 

70 






THE FABLE 

world within. And in both worlds there are 
"laws," as we call them, recognized: some 
things both in the world without and the world 
within are inevitable; a law of necessity gov- 
erns them. In others there are tendencies that 
can be discerned; they are under a law of 
"probability." Transactions and the working 
of forces in the moral and physical world, can 
be recognized as existing only under a fixed 
sequence, or a tendency; and hence the idea of 
a reasonable transaction has an analogy with 
the conceptions of physical science, which rest 
upon a belief in stable laws, or tendencies. 

In the actual world of experience these laws 
are not found working with a clean and neat 
obviousness. The mountain range has its 
story, but it is not a distinct and single story. 
The mountain does not rise to its height and 
then decay, but rises and falls, grows and de- 
cays, both at once and confusedly. The crystal 
of nature is not perfect; the chemical salt of 
the rock is not pure. The world that we 
actually see and feel and hear and smell and 
know is an overwhelming confusion; we be- 
lieve it orderly, we can find some orderly tend- 
encies in it ; to some extent we can give it order 
in a laboratory ; and yet the law, the clean-cut 

71 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

sequence, is a simplification of the facts, not an 
actually perceived thing. So no man's life is 
a neatly plotted story, but only fits and starts 
of a story. And as the man of science imposes 
upon the confusion of facts the pattern of his 
mind, makes them orderly by his geometry, his 
physics, and his zoology, so the teller of tales 
deals with human life, in part finding and in 
part creating a scheme or order of things with 
which human nature agrees, but which it does 
not realize. 

The imaginative creator, then, carries out 
the thwarted and imperfectly realized tenden- 
cies to be perceived in actual life to their 
"logical" results; his world is simpler, more 
symmetrical, more connected, even more 
"probable" or "necessary" than the world of 
fact. The novelist is no exception; he too like 
the poet or the dramatist has in his own way 
to systematize life, to give it a pattern. The 
word pattern looks strange when applied to a 
process, to something going forward in time. 
The idea of patterning a form, a carpet, or a 
carved moulding awakens no surprise ; but how 
pattern the story of a picnic, a murder, or a 
life? The object of making a pattern is to give 
an agreeable orderliness to things in confu- 

72 



THE FABLE 

sion, to bring a controlling unity into diversity. 
Its simplest means is repetition. Take a little 
curve ; double it over, in other words repeat it 
symmetrically; you have the simplified outline, 
say, of a rose petal. Eepeat the symmetrical 
form five times about a centre; — you have the 
outline of a rose in its lowest terms. Eepeat 
the outline again and again over a surface — in 
rows right and left, up and down, and you 
have a simple design, a pattern — to cover a 
wall or a ceiling or a floor. Such a pattern 
might be not unpleasing, but its excessive sim- 
plicity is dull; something more than mere 
orderliness is requisite to create charm and in- 
terest. An orderliness that conquers, an order- 
liness that reduces refractory or difficult 
material to system ; a unity that attains wealth 
of variety and surprises of discovery and de- 
lights of delicacy interests and excites more 
than regiments of lines and squares. So a pat- 
tern involving contrasts reduced to harmony; 
— a pleasant group of rounded contours with 
gradations of shadows and light, a series of 
carved festoons or the capitals of a row of 
pillars; or the sharper contrasts between 
the keen edges of light on a row of but- 
tresses and the black shadows of arched win- 

73 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

(lows in a thick wall ; or spaced marble statues 
in green shadows in a garden; — all such oppo- 
sitions brought to order are more interesting 
than the dull flatness of a little pink rosette 
repeated over and over on a cream-coloured 
ground. A pleasant pattern is an orderly 
thing, but it is the more interesting the more 
decided the contrasts it can reduce to order. 
It is systematic; and at the same time it is 
more interesting as it conquers not only con- 
trast but complexity. An ingenious pattern, 
rejoicing in a multitude of details, all brought 
to order: the border of an illuminated manu- 
script with an abundance of sharp leaves or 
a wavy tendrilled vine; a Japanese silk with 
dragons and strange birds and elaborate 
lotuses in ordered procession, are more inter- 
esting than a plain wall-paper or a dotted 
muslin. So good patterning is orderly; but it is 
orderly by controlling and admitting contrast 
and complextiy. 

Now the decent patterning of repeated forms 
may be accomplished by any person of fair 
intelligence and good schooling who is not 
absolutely without a sense of formal beauty. 
But there is a higher ideal of design, a pattern 
which brings to unity more subtly related 

74 



THE FABLE 

material still. The best of the mechanically 
repeated patterns only gives moderate pleas- 
antness to useful materials. But there is a 
nobler beauty of design which suggests the 
delicate curvature and subtle gradation of 
natural contours; such is the beauty of a fine 
painting or a noble group of sculpture. In 
these there is a balance not absolute but ap- 
proximate, a balance of mass of light and dark, 
an underlying symmetry which gives to forms 
which are not mechanically symmetrical an 
order felt but not obtruded. Things succeed- 
ing each other in time may in their way receive 
an orderly scheme, a pattern; and like designs 
in outline and colour they may be patterned 
either with mechanical symmetry or with the 
higher beauty of an underlying, a suggested 
and immanent symmetry. 

There is a mechanical pattern in the drum- 
beat, the march of soldiery, in all the routine 
which governs military life. The dance is pat- 
terned movement. Verse receives a pattern 
from repetition. The feet of verse repeat 
measured sequences of stressed and unstressed 
syllables; lines repeat the measured sequence 
of feet; stanzas repeat the regular groupings 
of the lines. Ehyme and assonance and al- 

75 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

literation repeat sounds. But not alone in 
mechanism and outward form but in the evolu- 
tion of ideas and the sequence of emotions 
poems are often built upon a framework of 
repetition, generally of repetition with prog- 
ress. The ballad of Edward has a symmetrical 
pattern of rhythms, and a symmetry of recur- 
rent words, — a symmetry also of action bal- 
anced and rhythmically repeating itself, but 
growing in dread and terror. In some boldly 
artificial types of prose, the same method is 
followed. The story of The Three Bears is 
simply and very artificially patterned, with its 
big bowl, and its middle-sized bowl and its lit- 
tle bowl; its rejecting of the big chair and the 
middle-sized chair and its breaking of the little 
chair ; and so throughout it is as rhythmical in 
plot as a lyric poem in cadences. And some- 
thing of this charm of patterned action, though 
of a far more intricate pattern, as being nearer 
to real life, has a part to play in creating the 
interest of a novel. The fable, the core of 
story, the transaction, deserves the name of 
plot when gracefully by idealizing simplifica- 
tion it receives a pattern. 

A novel, being ' ' realistic, ' ' approaching the 
impression of natural things, bears a relation 

76 



THE FABLE 

to the artificially built composition not dis- 
similar to that which the painting of a subject 
bears to the conventional decorations nsed in 
a repeated pattern. Its unity is normally 
an immanent, guiding, controlling principle 
wrought out through a process which ap- 
proaches nature in subtlety and delicacy of out- 
line and gradation, and in infinity and com- 
plexity of relations. Yet sometimes even in 
novels repetitions of a somewhat mechanical 
type contribute to the symmetry and order of 
the work. Dickens, for example, obtains an 
external orderliness by repeating the speeches 
and characteristic actions of his persons. Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's habit of turning over his keys 
in his pocket, and Jerry Cruncher's forbidding 
his wife to flop, not only bring out the charac- 
teristics of Tulkinghorn and Jerry but main- 
tain a fixed and somewhat excited tone in 
Dickens's works, and give them the attractive- 
ness of ordered form. George Meredith, far 
less violently, utilizes the same means of effect ; 
Sir Austin quotes the scrip ; Adrian is ever and 
again marked as "discreet"; Miss Middleton 
is over and over a "rogue in porcelain.' ' In 
especial the structure of The Egoist consists 
in Sir Willoughby's floundering deeper and 

77 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

deeper in the same morass, perhaps with some- 
what too little of variety of gesture. Vanity 
Fair has a plot not wholly unlike that of The 
Three Bears. Becky Sharp proceeds from 
adventure to adventure up to the great 
smash-up. 

In a novel the unity of pattern is first of all 
present in the underlying conception realized 
in the work. This may be a purely intellectual 
problem to be solved ; a novel may be made like 
a rebus or a word puzzle. The writer begins 
with the idea of a hidden crime. He knows 
who committed it; and then he conceals the 
guilty man so that suspicion shall be plausibly 
excited against everybody but the real criminal, 
but so that when the secret is revealed it shall 
seem obvious that the real solution is the only 
possible one. In the detective tales of Poe, an 
examiner who knows the answer has con- 
structed an ingenious problem, and written it 
into a story (e.g., The Murders of the Rue 
Morgue, The Purloined Letter). Wilkie Col- 
lins (The Woman in White), and Sir Conan 
Doyle (the Sherlock Holmes stories), and 
James Payn (The Lost Sir Massingberd) do 
the same thing on a larger scale. Such narra- 
tives have indeed an interesting pattern and a 

78 






THE FABLE 

distinct and admirable quality of real though 
artificial unity; but their mechanical scheme 
and singleness of effect are on a far lower 
plane than that of true imaginative unity. 

Such conceptions are simple and mechanical 
and to that extent insignificant. The concep- 
tions proper to a novel are more complex and 
less distinct. Tom Jones has an idea, a fun- 
damental conception. The book manifests the 
character of a young man, essentially generous 
and sympathetic toward others, but heedless, 
inconsiderate, and weak of will before the 
temptations of sense and "good fellowship.' ' 
This man is exposed to a manifold experience ; 
he is perpetually falling, but perpetually re- 
covering. Fielding believes that however often 
and however low he might fall, he would yet 
be able to regain his self-control and his self- 
respect so long as he maintained his sincerity 
and the essential spirit of good-will to others. 
The ground conception of Vanity Fair is to 
present a contrast between two women's char- 
acters, one clever, brilliant, and attractive, 
even good natured in a way, but without heart; 
the other dull, not free from selfishness and 
petty weaknesses, but having real tenderness 
and a conscience. They lead their parallel 

79 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

lives, the clever one going on from one hollow 
social success to another, and ending in dirty 
squalor; the other suffering bitterly but in the 
end attaining happiness. The doctrine is that 
no amount of intellect or charm can make up 
for the lack of the gentler virtues, but that love 
— sympathy and sweetness — are so precious 
that they not only compensate for the absence 
of all intellectual brilliance but elevate the 
characters and purify them of their meanness 
and smallness. The themes of Dostoevsky's 
novels are themes of compassion, of compas- 
sion without self-deceit or sentimentality. Hu- 
man beings suffer all together, are at fault 
together, the virtuous with the sinful; and 
toward all, the rational feeling is of boundless 
pity, and of boundless sympathy. This theme 
is realized by Dostoevsky not as an abstract 
idea, but in the experiences of a group of 
imagined characters; as a force manifested in 
life. 

The first virtue of a plot, then, is intensity 
of vision. The highest type of narrative arises 
from an energetic imaginative conception, tak- 
ing possession of and filling the mind of the 
writer. If the matter be large and important, 
so much the better; but large or small, the 

80 



THE FABLE 

thing done should be seen as in the round, 
definite before the mind's eye, on the ground, 
complete. Such is the story in the first part of 
Charles Beade's The Cloister and the Hearth, 
or Scott's Ivanhoe, or Thackeray's Vanity 
Fair, or Hardy's Far from the Madding 
Crowd, or Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard 
Fever el. In each of these there is a thing 
done, a fully imagined transaction which works 
itself out in a fully imagined world. From 
such completely realized imaginative ideas re- 
sults a wholeness of texture and a natural 
unity. Even if the writer loses his vision at 
times and must recall it, if he admits irrele- 
vancy, or is led astray by the desire to incul- 
cate a doctrine, such a central imagination 
holds a work together; it may be ragged but 
it is centrally one. Thus it is with George 
Eliot's Adam Bede, in spite of the fact that 
her moral philosophy caused her to fail in 
faithfulness to her imaginative idea, which de- 
manded the death of Hettie on the scaffold, and 
a real mutilation of the lives of Arthur and 
Adam. Yet even the appended narrative, a 
supplementary story, meant to teach us to 
make the best of life in all circumstances, can- 
not destroy the strength of the central vision. 

81 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

The greater novels of the world, then, have 
a unity of theme, underlying concepts vividly 
realized. But this is not all of unity. A thing 
is not one because it has one end, one aim, one 
thought alone; it is built into one structure. 
This fitting of part to part in a novel gives 
the effect of sequence : the conception that inci- 
dents follow one another, grow out of each 
other — succeed each other in line and rank. 
The power of sequence is the story-teller's 
gift: it gives the springing elasticity of con- 
tinuous movement to Scott's narrative when 
once he takes his stride. It is the gift of 
Stevenson. Sometimes even the smaller men 
have it. Trollope, and Besant, and Henry 
Kingsley are not so great as George Eliot or 
Zola, but they are better story-tellers by nature. 
They "look before and after," they feel the 
connection of part with part, they are not con- 
fused or disturbed, or halted in their advance, 
by the fact of having several "threads" of 
narrative to carry along. They keep them 
spinning out, they knot them together, they 
have always the sense of progress, even when 
they go back from one line to carry another. 
But in George Eliot, when she drops one thread 
of her narrative to draw up another, there is a 

82 



THE FABLE 

sense of effort; the explanation is over-ample, 
the story halts or stumbles. 

The developed conception, then, fully ex- 
pressed, and moving in orderly sequence from 
a beginning to an end, requires also a shapely 
detlniteness to attain a finished unity. This 
definiteness is the effect of light and shade, of 
emphasis. So the unity of a work of fiction 
owes something to the degrees of salience of 
its parts. Contrast of part with part is one 
means — next perhaps to repetition the funda- 
mental means — of emphasis. The Three Mus- 
keteers; Soldiers Three; the three Brothers 
Karamazov ; the three Harlowes, the father and 
the two uncles of Clarissa, may serve as exam- 
ples of one very obvious means of applying 
the method of contrast in characters to the 
working out of the conception of a novel. It 
is to be noted that in all these cases a funda- 
mental parallelism underlies the contrast. Un- 
less the Three Musketeers were in one profes- 
sion, united by friendship, joined against one 
opponent, and associated for a single purpose, 
there would be no point in the contrasts be- 
tween one and another. ' i Soldiers Three ' ' are 
all British soldiers, of the lower class, ignorant 
but shrewd and of a special force of character, 

83 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

and are united like the Three Musketeers. 
The brothers Karamazov have all a nervous 
excitability, an intensity and recklessness, and 
superior minds; they are "Karamazovs." 
The three Harlowes are Harlowes, pig-headed, 
small-brained, impulsive. So it is on a paral- 
lelism that a contrast is based. It is by 
startling contrasts that Hugo's grotesque ef- 
fects are gained. It is a pity that he is con- 
trolled too little by his imagination, too much 
by the perverse will to be extreme * y for the 
force of his ideas is undeniable. Contrasts of 
situation between his characters but above all 
contrast between the normal condition and the 
actual are his means of effect. It is a criminal 
escaped from the galleys who is his saint; a 
harlot's child is his petted incarnation of inno- 
cence ; it is in a sewer that the highest heroism 
is manifested. 

The contrasted stories of the sisters in Pride 
and Prejudice, especially the main plot of 
Elizabeth and the sub-plot of Jane, run parallel 
courses, accentuating the difference in the char- 
acters and their lives, giving definiteness and 
individuality to the central story, and binding 
all the tales together. 

Recurrence of a motive with an increase in 
84 



THE FABLE 

intensity — climax — is a means of giving defi- 
niteness and unity to the structure of narra- 
tive. So there is a progress in Vanity Fair, in 
the importance of Becky's advances and fail- 
ures up to the supreme audacity and the 
supreme failure. And in Tess each thwart 
accident seems the most envious trick that a 
grimly jocular Fate can play, till death comes 
at last to end the cruel game. In all these in- 
stances the story gets shape and singleness 
through the binding up of each section into 
unity by the climax which ends it, and all are 
bound together by the dominance of the great 
climax. 

Clearness of outline and unity are gained by 
suspense. The curiosity is awakened, excited, 
titillated by a promised gratification only to be 
disappointed and excited again. Thus through- 
out the book all incidents are grouped, are 
brought into line by the mystery. Finally the 
solution relates the end to the beginning, and 
gives it consequence above all that intervenes. 
The method is effective, but only for one read- 
ing. Once the mystery is revealed the fun is 
gone; and gratification must be obtained from 
the incidents by the way, by the development 
in sequence, by the strangeness in harmony of 

85 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

the things done, by the substantial greatness 
of the work. Surprise, then, is a device rather 
than a principle of structure, likely to be 
mechanical, and to contribute to a less signifi- 
cant result than less smart but more imagina- 
tive methods. As Coleridge well says: " As 
the feeling with which we startle at a shooting 
star compared with that of watching the sun- 
rise at the pre-established moment, such and so 
low is surprise compared with expectation." 

These are the main means of emphasis, of 
giving to a narrative that clarity of relation 
between the greater and the less which is essen- 
tial to the unity of its form. There are other 
means : a firm beginning, a resonant ending, 
interruption, disconnection, staccato sharp- 
ness and voluminous amplitude; but these are 
secondary; they are devices of rhetoric or 
pieces of ingenuity. Repetition, Contrast, and 
Climax in the actual structure of the book are 
the vital means of emphasis. They enter into 
the conception of the whole and ramify through 
the book, build it and form it. 

The novel, then, as a thing designed, has 
many analogies with pictorial designs. A fun- 
damental idea, developed with sequence, pro- 
portion, and defining emphasis, give unity to 

86 



THE FABLE 

the pattern of both. The complexity of a 
transaction is likewise analogous to the com- 
plexity of patterns in form and colour. In an 
India shawl or a mediaeval German carved 
trellis there is a manifoldness, a union of many 
ideas in one effect. Consider a complex novel, 
say Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. 
It is the story of the winning of Bathsheba by 
Gabriel; but that story involves also the love 
of Bathsheba and Troy, the story of Troy and 
Fanny, the love of Boldwood for Bathsheba 
and its tragic end, the story of the farm affairs 
of Bathsheba and of Gabriel. Each is a trans- 
action recounted by itself; but all may be 
capable of being one story. Bathsheba takes 
part in every transaction, and then every trans- 
action helps or hinders Gabriel's wooing. The 
device of uniting many narratives by having 
the same main character in all is an easy arti- 
fice by which to produce at least the appearance 
of unity. But unless there is not only one hero 
but one transaction, one dominating piece of 
business to which each action contributes, the 
thread is a mere excuse, and the story drops to 
pieces. So it is with Dickens's David Copper- 
field, where the successful establishment of 
David in life at his second marriage is not in- 

87 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

teresting enough or sufficiently in the fore- 
ground to unite all the subsidiary narratives 
into a unit. The tale of David's childhood, of 
Steerforth and Emily, of Micawber and Heep, 
of David's marriage with Dora, are all sepa- 
rate, attached to David, but not subdued to one 
main narrative. Likewise in Middlemarch: 
the affair of Dorothea does not bind the facts 
into one. There is an interesting contrast and 
relationship of the different narratives and 
characters, but no one commanding thing is 
done. 

A plot may be complicated by making the sub- 
sidiary transactions contribute to the achieve- 
ment of a single end, — by making each group 
of forces act upon the other so as to produce a 
single result. Thus in Pride and Prejudice 
the separate transactions, the marriage of Col- 
lins and Charlotte, by bringing Lizzy to Pem- 
berton, the runaway match of Wickham and 
Lydia by justifying Mr. Darcy, and by giving 
him an opportunity to exercise his tactful gen- 
erosity, all move together to overcome the ob- 
stacles of Lizzy's Prejudice and Darcy 's 
Pride. It is perhaps from recognizing the 
pleasant, ingenious activity of the novelist's 
skill in draughting plots that one great source 

88 



THE FABLE 

of the pleasure of the reader who " reads for 
the story" arises. 

The " sub-plot" is one of the devices by 
which the skilful constructor lends complexity 
to his fables. A narrative parallel to the main 
one illustrates it by contrast or similarity, and 
contributes to its development. The treatment 
of the sub-plot is a problem of the utmost dif- 
ficulty : it must be interesting enough to engage 
the attention, but not so interesting as to chal- 
lenge the superiority of the main subject, to 
the effect of which it should contribute by its 
power of contrast or parallelism. The sub- 
plot of Pride and Prejudice is one of the very 
few that accomplishes this. The love-affair of 
Jane and Bingley awakens an agreeable sym- 
pathy without overriding the superiority of 
the more brilliant and decisive Elizabeth and 
Darcy. The fortunes and careers of the two 
sisters are sufficiently similar and sufficiently 
emphasize alike the resemblances and the dif- 
ferences of their characters, and the one trans- 
action contributes to and moves along the 
other. Antithetic plots dividing the interest 
equally between two heroes or heroines are not 
likely to be successful. In Vanity Fair the 
seesaw effect scatters the interest and makes 

89 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

it difficult to keep continuous movement go- 
ing on. 

We may distinguish between the complexity 
of ingenious construction and the complexity of 
nature, the one infinite alike in power and 
subtlety, the other wonderful but by will, with 
a certain restlessness or a sense of smartness. 

Higher than this effect of clear but com- 
plicated patterning, of clever and dashing 
draughtsmanship, is the more significant and 
the subtler quality of gradation and the sug- 
gestion of infinity; for delicacy involves in- 
finity. It is contrast and emphasis which are 
finite. As regards plot, the higher complexity 
is manifested not in haze or indefiniteness, but 
in the suggestion of mystery and of a depth in 
causation and effect. There is something of 
this quality in Henry Esmond as a story. We 
read it, follow it, understand it ; but when it is 
done it is like life. It is natural; but we feel 
that there is still something unrecorded, that 
much in himself has been dimly felt but not re- 
vealed even by the autobiographer. There is 
something of this quality also in Meredith, in 
Turgenev, in Tolstoy. There is something un- 
told about the causes of the things that have 
happened in their plots ; there is a blended edge 

90 



THE FABLE 

about their characters and their motives, as 
there is about real persons. 

In general usage the name of plot or fable 
is confined to a transaction taking place in the 
outer world: the world of physical fact. The 
moral development or decadence of a soul is a 
subject of great, of fearful interest, and it may 
well be the main theme of a narrative ; but un- 
less it is made evident by a system of events 
in the world of fact it is not by most people 
thought of as constituting a story. Tito must 
go from deceit to actual treason and must com- 
mit base murder; Romola must not only grow 
in inner strength and sweetness but must in 
fact refuse to obey Savonarola, must care for 
the plague-stricken peasants and bring up 
Tessa's children. It is not enough for the 
nature to be manifest; it must do the deeds 
which manifest its change. And in fact, as 
most readers feel, the events of the narrative 
must have a certain connection and consistency, 
must make up a series, which have a pattern 
or development apart from the character de- 
velopment connected with them. A biography 
of wandering and experience, of incident fol- 
lowing incident connected only by the sense of 
growth and change in the character is not what 

91 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

most people would call a genuine plot, how- 
ever natural and rational and interesting it 
may be. 

This idealized, simplified, and so heightened 
action, this that we call a plot, is often thought 
and spoken of as the prime necessity of the 
story. Of the drama Aristotle declares it to 
be the soul. But for the novel, the elaborate 
patterning of the transaction is not so vital. 
Ingenious construction and neat finish, even 
singleness of structure, are not so essential in 
this type of composition. Certainly the great- 
est English novelists are not great draughts- 
men, or skilful finishers of plots. Certainly not 
Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray, nor Meredith 
or Hardy, nor Bennett or Wells. The plot- 
makers are smaller figures, like Wilkie Collins. 
The close-knit structural quality of Hardy 's 
Return of the Native is seldom found in the 
English novel in union with the greater im- 
aginative qualities. 

The narrative of a novel is composed of the 
narrative of separate events; of incidents. 
The fable is of various classes according to the 
relation of these events to the whole narrative. 
In one class of story — that which is in construc- 
tion most like a play — the central theme is 

92 



THE FABLE 

dominant throughout. The story begins with 
an exposition of conditions, followed by the 
introduction of the force, the struggle of which 
with opposition makes up the body of the nar- 
rative. This struggle is divided into the rising 
action, or complication, and the falling action, 
or solution. The transition from the rising to 
the falling action is the crisis or climax. The 
story ends with a new condition of affairs, des- 
tined to be stable, unless changed by another 
force — the catastrophe or denouement. At 
marked points of transition from stage to stage 
in the progress of the action there are minor 
crises; but the distinguishing feature of this 
type of plot is that it has but one central move- 
ment upward and downward, and that accord- 
ingly it has but one climax. 

Novels with plots of this kind are Anthony 
Trollope's The Warden and Thomas Hardy's 
Tess. 

The story of The Warden is that a sweet- 
tempered and delicately scrupulous English 
gentleman and clergyman held the office of 
Warden of an ancient charitable establishment 
— a hospital or asylum for twelve poor wool- 
carders of his town. There were no more wool- 
carders there, and the literal fulfilment of the 

93 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

terms of the will had become impossible. But 
twelve poor men, so-called wool-carders, were 
well cared for ; and the Warden, who was pre- 
centor of the Cathedral and had brought its 
music to a high pitch of excellence, enjoyed a 
comfortable and indeed beautiful living from 
the foundation. An energetic movement for an 
inquiry into the honest enforcement of the 
provisions of various old endowments was led 
by a certain John Bold — who was, as it hap- 
pened, the lover of the Warden's daughter. 
A violent and vulgar liberal paper in the town 
brings in question the strictness and loyalty 
with which the terms of the will establishing 
the Hospital are obeyed. Bold will not push the 
investigation ; but the Warden cannot be happy 
in his position until he can be assured by good 
legal authority that he is entitled to the emolu- 
ments of the wardenship. His conservative 
son-in-law, the Archdeacon, is indignant. He 
urges the Warden that not only as a sensible 
man, but as a representative of his own party 
or group he must not yield to the absurd 
radical attack upon him ; but the more delicate 
and scrupulous Warden comes slowly and pain- 
fully to the conclusion that he cannot retain 
the place with a doubt in his own mind as to 

94 



THE FABLE 

the propriety of his action. He resigns, gives 
up his beautiful garden, reduces himself to 
straitened means. In time his daughter mar- 
ries Bold, and the Precentor, no longer 
Warden, comes to spend so much of his time 
at their house that he permits his beloved 
violoncello to be taken there. The wardenship 
is left vacant, the Bishop being unwilling to 
put any gentleman into the cruel position in 
which the Warden had been placed. 

Here there is one transaction — the Warden's 
being brought by the scrupulousness of his 
conscience to resign. The exposition acquaints 
the reader with the settled conditions of the 
little cathedral town, the rising action begins 
with the suggestion of an inquiry into the 
administration of the ancient foundations, the 
crisis is reached with the Warden's flight to 
London in order to consult his legal adviser 
away from his overwhelming son-in-law the 
Archdeacon, and the downward action follows, 
swiftly progressing from the resignation to 
the establishment of a new order of things in 
the Precentor's life, and in the administration 
of the trust. 

Likewise in Tess: the narrative expounds 
the state of life into which Tess is born, the 

95 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

wretched condition of the family, and the 
ancient dignity of the D'Urberville name. The 
forces of active evil in the world about her 
begin to be manifested in her exposure to Alec 
D 'Urberville ; those moving toward her protec- 
tion and happiness in the love of Angel Clare. 
The contention of the two makes np the strug- 
gle of the story; and when Angel Clare after 
his marriage to Tess leaves her upon learning of 
her relations with Alec, the supreme climax is 
reached. Tess has been rescued from wander- 
ing in the desert of misery, surrounded with 
protection, led to look into a promised land 
of happiness. She is dashed from hope ; then 
the reappearance of Alec, and Tess's renewal 
of relations with him to help her family, lead 
on to the final desperate act of Tess, in taking 
his life; and the catastrophe, the execution of 
Tess, merely signalizes a victory already 
gained by the sardonic evil of the world. The 
story is not only one, but each smaller part is 
part of the one. The upward movement is one 
and continuous, there is one climax, one down- 
ward course. Such a plot, analogous to that 
required for the highest dramatic effect, may 
be called a dramatic plot. 

In other novels, however, though there is a 
96 



THE FABLE 

single transaction, with a beginning, a middle, 
and an end, there is no single rising or falling 
action; there are several points of culmination, 
several sections of pretty level interest, but no 
one dominant climax. Such is Thackeray's 
Pendennis. In it there is a transaction: Pen 
goes through the period of youth, has his love- 
affairs and his troubles, " finds himself," and 
gets settled in life. But he does not go straight 
to the bottom, and come back from the lowest 
depths to the top; he has his affair with the 
Fotheringay, and his difficulties with Deuceace 
and the paper ; he is being formed into a man, 
and he wins a place as a clever writer, and a 
place in life. Each part of the narrative is a 
part of one whole, but there is no overmaster- 
ing central incident, toward and from w^hich the 
story moves. Such a narrative has a single- 
ness and an effect of design in the relation of 
the incidents such as justify the name of plot ; 
it may fairly be called an epic, as distinguished 
from a dramatic plot. 

But the relation of the parts to the whole 
may be looser. A story may have a thread of 
narrative running through it, holding it to- 
gether, but its real interest may be in the sepa- 
rate tales grouped about the central narrative, 

97 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

somehow related to it, but making up as a 
whole no single transaction. Such is David 
Copper field. In a way, the growing up of David 
from infancy to manhood, and his establish- 
ment in life is a thread of narrative. But the 
stories of Steerforth and Uriah Heep are not 
part of the central story, but are suspended 
from it, like Chinese lanterns on a string. Such 
a story has a connected fable, but not a suffi- 
ciently designed and interrelated narrative to 
deserve the name of plot; it may, for con- 
venience, be called an episodic fable. 

There are books called novels in which even 
this thin thread of events is lacking, and inci- 
dents follow in sequence, the real interest 
being in these individual incidents. The work 
has only the unity of consistency of tone, and 
a grouping about a central character to pro- 
duce some effect of design. Such is Pickwick 
Papers. No transaction is discoverable here, 
running throughout the book, even as a thread. 
Mr. Pickwick and his friends might have any 
number of adventures, or might have missed 
any one of those which they had. They rise 
to no one height of happiness, and fall into no 
one depth of misery or misfortune, but go 
plunging from one ludicrous accident to the 

98 



THE FABLE 

next. They are always the same; we are at 
home in the book, because we meet old friends 
wherever we open it. And when it is closed it 
is finished. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick can 
no more come back. Yet the book is not one 
structure. If it has a single life, it is like that 
of the worm which, on being cut in two, quar- 
relled in its two parts as to which should carry 
on its diary. Some critics deny the name of 
novel to such a narrative. And yet, in the 
special atmosphere which pervades it, in its 
temper and quality, it is in a way single. The 
incidents oi; Pickwick belong to Pickwick, and 
to no other book. 

If a name be needed by which to designate 
this genial type of narrative, we may call its 
fable a linked fable. 

Narratives which have unity in the transac- 
tion achieved must plainly contain three parts : 
the beginning, the middle, and the end. Aris- 
totle 's definition is quaint, but not so foolish as 
it sounds. The beginning is that which does 
not of necessity follow upon anything else, but 
after which something else inevitably follows; 
the end is that which naturally follows upon 
something else, either by inevitable law or by 
a general tendency, but after which nothing 

99 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

else need follow. The middle is that which 
naturally follows upon something and leads to 
something else. These words imply that to tell 
the story of a transaction effected by a force 
one must make clear what the force works on, 
and must also make clear when the force begins 
its work. At the beginning there is a condition 
of things which will not change until something 
changes it; a world, so to speak, little or big 
which is complete and stable unless some force 
disturbs its stability. Perhaps it is a little vil- 
lage, in which everything seems as if it had 
always been the same from the beginning of 
days, and would always be the same until the 
end of days; perhaps it is a family group, 
unaware of any impending vicissitudes of for- 
tune ; perhaps it is just an unformed boy, wait- 
ing for the influences which are to mould him 
and help to make his life. A force enters; a 
visitor from the city comes to the village, a 
child expresses ambitions alien to the sym- 
pathies of his elders, the boy is told something 
which he did not know about his ancestry. 
Nothing was needed before this beginning, but 
now the workings begun must be followed by 
consequences. To understand the middle of 
the working of the force, everything that went 

100 



THE FABLE 

before is requisite; and again the activity has 
no meaning except in its consequences. The 
middle needs the end ; — the end, when the force 
completes its cycle by creating a new condition 
of things, which will remain unchanged until 
a new force works upon it. The village belle 
has married the city man or her old lover, and 
the village settles back in relief; the family has 
lost its unity or grown stronger; the boy has 
lost his life in the struggle of his people, with 
whom he has thrown in his lot, or has won the 
throne of his ancestors. A cycle is completed. 
A force working under the law of necessity or 
general tendency is followed from the instant 
when it broke in upon one order of things, big 
or little, worked upon it, and brought it to a 
new order of things, which it would require a 
new force to modify. 

It is common to speak of that beginning as 
best which is briefest and most ' ' dramatic, ' ' — 
clearing the way for the interaction of the 
forces which make up the real story in the 
quickest and liveliest way possible. But the 
truth is that the nature of the beginning is de- 
termined by the nature of the narrative which 
it is to introduce; the fundamental idea of the 
narrative should dominate the author in the 

101 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

approach to the story, as well as in its working 
out. The prime question is, then, whether the 
introduction is of the right temper and matter 
for the particular narrative which follows, not 
whether it is long or short, dramatic or descrip- 
tive. The novels of Scott, in which the back- 
ground is very full, and in which the themes 
are the contrasts and struggles between great 
bodies of men, — Scotch and English, High- 
lander and Lowlander, Cavalier and Cove- 
nanter, — require an amplitude and weight above 
those of moral conflicts within the soul or be- 
tween individuals. This is still more the case 
when the setting is slight. Thus George 
Meredith's novels, being psychological in theme 
and giving little sense of an outer world or of 
a large and complicated social order, require 
less introduction than Scott's. But with this 
proviso, the idea that brevity and a dramatic 
quality are merits of the beginning is entirely 
true. It is indeed a fault in Sir Walter Scott 
that his beginnings should not only be slow, 
but should be abstract and didactic. Though 
his themes are large and weighty, yet if they 
were as thoroughly realized from the outset 
as they become later, they could be presented 
imaginatively and not in the abstract, by action 

102 



THE FABLE 

and not by explanation. On the other hand, 
Miss Jane Austen is entitled to the praise uni- 
versally given to the famous beginning of 
Pride and Prejudice for its immediate, clear, 
simple, dramatic, and witty initiation of the 
reader into the life within which the narrative 
is to be developed. 

The end of a novel of the finest type of con- 
struction has as its prime merit that it main- 
tains the unity of the book by bringing the 
transaction to its natural issue; "it is that 
after which nothing more is necessary.' ' A 
good ending, then, does not leave its narrative 
fragmentary; whether by suggestion or by ex- 
plicit declarations, it presents the well per- 
ceived consequence and conclusion of the forces 
which have created the narrative. But endings 
generally, if they err, err not by leaving the 
work incomplete, but by adding irrelevant de- 
tails — by saying more than enough, or by 
beginning the suggestion of new narratives. 
The good ending concludes the essential narra- 
tive, sufficiently and not redundantly, and if 
possible by exciting the imagination — by a sig- 
nificant act or speech, and not by elaborate 
explanation. Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, it 
is often said, should have ended: "And the 

103 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

knitting women counted twenty-three." The 
marriage of Charles and Lucie, and the re- 
establishment of the shaken household in Lon- 
don, could have been taken for granted. Scott's 
ends are hasty, improbable, and lacking in jus- 
tification, and yet often overloaded with "un- 
concerning things — matters of fact." Indeed 
our great novelists of the earlier nineteenth 
century, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, are 
generally indifferent to the endings of their 
tales, as Shakespeare is to the endings of his 
plays. It is part of the economy of a more 
conscientious art — not necessarily the power of 
a higher genius — which causes the ends of The 
Return of the Native and of The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel to come to a finer, sharper, 
and clearer last touch than is common in the 
" classic' ' novelists. Arnold Bennett in The 
Old Wives' Tale gives the reader the sense of 
the slow subsiding of life's force, and brings 
his narrative to a clean ending, without diffuse- 
ness or inadequacy. 

The " weakness of the spectators" is given 
by Aristotle as the reason why the happy end- 
ing, even when it is not justified by the course 
of the drama which it concludes, is preferred 
to the unhappy one. As Henry James wittily 

104 



THE FABLE 

suggested, the readers look at the ending of the 
novel as the dessert. Their taste is youthful; 
the ending must be sweet and it must be 
abundant. Many readers also like it soft. So 
everybody is brought to the footlights; and 
with a " Bless you, my children!" all the pairs 
are dismissed by a kindly grandpapa to hap- 
piness, and all the decent old people are left to 
their reposeful nodding and knitting in the 
evening of their life. It is perhaps not won- 
derful that some irritated novelists should have 
been perversely unkind to their characters, and 
despotic to their plots, and should have ended 
plots and characters with unreasonable harsh- 
ness and sternness. Here as elsewhere the law 
of unity of tone and probability should rule. 
A novel of tragic tone throughout is imper- 
tinently concluded by a happy ending, while a 
comic tale is ridiculous without its comic end- 
ing, — unhappy only for the rogues and the 
butts. A genuinely serious narrative is the 
more impressive if it end with a catastrophe; 
but the question is not so easy for tales of 
mixed sunshine and shadow, and especially for 
nervous stories ; — tales of frivolous and super- 
ficial characters, whose sorrows are legiti- 
mately only annoying. Sometimes it seems to 

105 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

me that Thomas Hardy has taken some of his 
characters too solemnly — that Eustacia, for 
instance, has no right to so august an end as 
death, and that she should have been left to a 
dusty and fretted life. 

The comparison of the narrative to the solu- 
tion of a problem, the definition of it as a 
process of the same kind as those taking place 
in the world of " Nature," the recognition of 
its "laws" as comparable to those of science, 
produce the impression that a well-made narra- 
tive in itself is a dry and bare thing, an ab- 
stractly definite thing. But these comparisons 
are intended to insist upon the nature of the 
plot as a unit, and to make clear that it is 
not unique, but that it is like the other sim- 
plifications of life which are necessary for intel- 
lectual and practical purposes. The transac- 
tions which make up a plot are not interesting 
simply because they begin somewhere and end 
somewhere else, but because they pass along a 
road every step of which has its excitement or 
its delight. Novels are not like chemist's 
operations, where the thing of importance is 
what you start in with and what you come out 
with, but things in which every bubble, every 
fizzing, every change of hue, is interesting. It is 

106 



THE FABLE 

not the cold formula of a love story that attracts 
and enchants : borne human beings are living 
in an ordered group (exposition) among them 
a young woman and a young man evidently 
destined to be married to each other (beginning 
of the action) ; there are obstacles in the way 
(complication) ; the obstacles seeming too great 
to be overcome, a way out is hinted (crisis) ; 
the difficulties are removed (falling action) ; 
though just at the end a hitch occurs (final sus- 
pense) ; which is cleared away, and the mar- 
riage takes place (the catastrophe). This is 
like the story of a Seidlitz powder. The con- 
tents of a blue and a white paper are sepa- 
rately dissolved. The two colourless solutions 
stand in two crystal glasses. Mix them: they 
begin to effervesce, they boil over stormily, 
they subside to quietness; at the end there is 
one colourless solution in one crystal glass. It 
is the interest in these particular young people 
(the more unusual they are the more interest- 
ing), in their particular situation (the more 
uncommon, but natural, the more interesting), 
with their particular troubles solved in their 
particular way, and their particular feelings, 
that, combined in the framework of the probable 
and ordinary, gives interest to the tale. It is 

107 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

the love-story of Jane and Rochester, of Lucy 
and Richard, not any love-story. And what 
has been called the problem of a novelist is not 
making a plot, not working out a formula, but 
perceiving what these definite and complex 
people, in their definite and complex situa- 
tion, would enact as a definite and complex 
transaction. The problem is concrete and 
actual, not abstract. 

The union of the normal and the exceptional 
attends the writer all the way at every step of 
his journey. Each speech may be a surprise, 
— the revelation of a thing natural, but unex- 
pected, perhaps astonishing. Each situation 
may be new, but just what was to have been 
expected when it does happen. So the union 
of the marvellous with the probable appears in 
the fable not only in the prime conception and 
building up of the structure, but in the detail 
of the evolution, and in the working out of the 
idea into actuality. There is even place for a 
certain whim, a certain strangeness, — not ex- 
cessive, — for even in normal life absolute 
rigidity of inevitable sequence would itself ap- 
pear as abnormal, as monstrous. An occa- 
sional run of luck is a mathematical necessity. 

According to the temperament and imagina- 
108 



THE FABLE 

tion of a writer one or another aspect of the 
plot is likely to be emphasized. One man has a 
stronger sense of symmetric relation, and less 
of interest in abundance and variety. His 
novels are likely to be insistent npon inevitable 
sequence and to dwell upon a fundamental idea, 
—to be not so much ample and rich as energetic 
and distinct. So Samuel Butler in The Way of 
All Flesh and Meredith in The Egoist accent 
what may be called the ground idea relatively 
often and sharply. Another writer delights in 
detail and abundance ; and such a man is likely 
to be exuberantly fertile in incident^ Thus 
as Sir Walter Scott genially confesses when 
charged with negligence in construction: 
"When I light on such a character as Bailie 
Jarvie, or Dalgetty, my imagination brightens, 
and my conception becomes clearer at every 
step which I take in his company, although it 
leads me many a weary mile away from the 
regular road, and forces me to leap hedge and 
ditch to get back to the regular road again. If 
I resist the temptation, as you advise me, my 
thoughts become prosy, flat, and dull; I write 
painfully to myself, and under a consciousness 
of flagging which makes me flag still more ; the 
sunshine with which fancy had invested the 

109 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

incidents, departs from them, and leaves every- 
thing dull and gloomy." Some authors delight 
in whim and coincidence, others abhor them. 
Fielding's telling irony and somewhat imper- 
tinent improbability press coincidence to the 
limit, perhaps beyond the limit, of accepta- 
bility, while Henry James's novels and tales, 
however slight, are attended with an equally 
ironical fatefulness, uncomfortable or hu- 
morous. 

We are offended not with marvel, but with 
marvel unreconciled; not with a strange thing 
but with a strange thing left to seem unreason- 
able, and especially with a contradiction. An 
accident — a merely superficial improbability 
due to neglect or carelessness is a fault but a 
slight fault. It is more likely to amuse than 
to offend the reader. Robinson Crusoe, in the 
first edition of the story of that name, swam 
ashore, naked, and soon after found his pockets 
full of biscuit. The seasons get mixed in Tom 
Jones. Thackeray accidentally called Philip 
Firmin Clive Newcome, and set the pioneers 
to tapping, for sugar, the maple-trees brilliant 
with the colours of Autumn. Such errors are 
obvious and external, and are proportionally 
insignificant. They do not affect the life or the 

110 



THE FABLE 

imaginative energy of the novel, but are smiled 
over and forgotten. 

Even violent external improbabilities meant 
simply to get a hero out of a scrape are likely 
to be so frank and naive that they amuse with- 
out offending. Senior in his criticism of 
Scott's Boh Roy is amused by the outrageous 
violence of the denouement. ' ' The author him- 
self as he goes on, finds himself so thoroughly 
involved in the meshes of his plot, that seeing 
no legitimate extrication, he clears himself at 
last by the most absolute, we had almost said 
the most tyrannical exercise of the empire 
which authors must be acknowledged to have 
over their personages and events, which we 
recollect, even in the annals of that despotic 
class of sovereigns. . . . He had resolved 
that his hero should after the custom of heroes, 
enjoy the family estate and marry the heroine. 
But the estate is in the hands of an uncle, with 
six healthy sons ; the heroine is pledged either 
to marry one of them or to take the veil. . . . 
An ordinary novelist . . . would not have 
killed all the six sons by differ ent violent 
deaths, and the father of a broken heart for 
their loss, within the space of six months. If 
the sudden death of one person be a most inar- 

111 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

tificial mode of bringing about a catastrophe, 
what shall we say of this literary execution of 
a whole family V 9 

Now all this is a fault in Scott, it is a 
serious fault, but it is not a mortal fault. 
The profoundly, the essentially offensive im- 
probability is the contradiction in the action 
of some inner law or tendency of the whole 
book, either in tone or idea. This is a malady 
of the soul of the novel, not a mere blotch or 
blemish marring its beauty but not sapping its 
life. The Count of Monte Cristo is infected 
with this kind of inner self-contradiction, the 
savagery of the spirit of revenge being opposed 
to the generous nature of the Count, and the 
general idea that the wicked nature will bring 
on its own punishment being worked out too 
mechanically to have any moral interest, al- 
though a moral interest is insisted upon. The 
dead man's treasure and the wrong done to 
Dantes are entirely acceptable as the data of a 
narrative, but the tale developed from them 
depends too much upon violent assumptions 
and extraordinary coincidences to be agreeable 
except to very young people. On the other 
hand, The Three Musketeers is so consistently 
marvellous in spirit, so genially a tale of mere 

112 



THE FABLE 

adventure, that it in no way contradicts its own 
nature by its marvels. George Meredith vio- 
lates the whole rationalistic and superficially 
subtle logic of The Egoist by making the suc- 
cessive egoistic acts of Sir Willoughby so crude 
and stupid; the Egoist ceases to be a moral 
problem and becomes the butt of an allegory. 
Dostoevsky contradicts the sense of causality 
which makes his novels seem fatal by endowing 
some of his pure and noble characters, for 
example, Father Zossima, not merely with 
natural wisdom, but with practically miracu- 
lous insight. In all these cases there is an 
inner improbability, a failure of truth to the 
fundamental idea of the character or of the 
entire novel, which is not a mere superficial 
blemish, but a profound defect. 



113 



CHAPTER IV 

CHAKACTER 

Characters, the characters of actual life, are 
hypothetical, transcendental, objects of faith, 
not of immediate experience. We know them 
wholly through symbols ; just as we know char- 
acters in books. We infer these characters or 
we imagine them. In actual life we observe 
some of the symbols directly, in books we read 
a record of them, but in either case we create 
the character by the same processes, and the 
characters thus created have the same reality 
to us. 

A character is only a hypothesis accounting 
for the phenomena offered by the conduct and 
appearance of our fellow beings ; it is, in other 
words, the patterning of human relations 
which makes the perplexing confusion of our 
experience of humanity simple enough to be 
manageable. Moreover, a character in the 
actual world is a simplification by processes 
most nearly analogous to those of art, not of 
science. That is, it is concrete, not abstract, 
and is mainly the work of the imagination, 

114 



CHARACTER 

working not by direction but by inner neces- 
sity. We know that thick-chinned Tom with a 
lisp, not an abstract A or Richard Roe; we 
know him by onr unconscious mind imagining 
what he must be. At the basis of the business 
of life, of our dealings with others in every 
relation, is a dimly artistic imaginative act, 
creating our belief in the characters of others, 
made more or less in the image of ourselves. 
The artist, whether poet or novelist, works in 
his fictitious world more intensely and more 
consecutively but in the same way in which we 
all must work in the world of our actual 
experience. 

The argument against plots is very plausible, 
and so familiar that it requires no amplifica- 
tion. In outline it is as follows. There are no 
such things in nature: nothing begins or ends 
in reality. Life is confusing but rich; then an 
art which strives for symmetry and order is 
necessarily both false and thin. The " realist," 
then, and still more the "naturalist,' ' can 
know only phenomena, as men do in actuality. 
Evidently, the same course of reasoning proves 
characters to be superficial inventions : life in 
its richness and continuity knows nothing so 
static or so inadequate as a personality. There 

115 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

is no we; there is a "stream" of conscious- 
ness, a blending moving picture, a phantasma- 
goria, of impressions, some bright, some faint. 
The stream has its eddies and its return cur- 
rents; it splits and reunites. To insist upon a 
unity of consciousness within, is like invoking 
the spirit of a river; the idea of personality 
is as obsolete as Father Thames or Father 
Tiber with his urn. He who disbelieves in 
plot, then, must if he is consistent go on to 
hold that the idea of character is not grounded 
in reason and to insist upon the sole legitimacy 
of the phenomenon, of the essentially fleeting, 
or of the immediate act. 

Now no one can force his mind to such 
nihilism as all that; but there are books in 
which the authors have been so deeply inter- 
ested in impressions that the characters are as 
little coherent as is consistent with the effect 
of sanity in the composition. Take the novels 
of the brothers Goncourt, for example. Mr. 
Arthur Symons says of them in the Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica, ' ' To the Goncourts humanity 
is as pictorial a thing as the world it moves 
in; they do not search further than 'the phys- 
ical basis of life,' and they find everything that 
can be known of that unknown force written 

116 



CHAKACTER 

visibly upon the sudden faces of little inci- 
dents, little expressive moments. The soul, to 
them, is a series of moods, which succeed one 
another, certainly without any of the too arbi- 
trary logic of the novelist who has conceived 
of character as a solid or consistent thing. 
Their novels are hardly stories at all, but 
picture-galleries, hung with pictures of the 
momentary aspects of the world." This is a 
sympathetic way of putting what is expressed 
with witty malice by Jules Lemaitre. " There 
are empty spaces between the scenes ; and there 
are empty spaces likewise in the development of 
the characters. It is as if we were looking 
at a house from the outside. A man walking 
about inside appears to us now at one window, 
now at another; and in the intervals we do 
not see him at all. The windows are the 
chapters in the novels of the Goncourts. And 
sometimes we look in at one of the windows 
expecting to see the man, but he does not go by 
at all." 

Such in art is the logical conclusion of the 
infinitesimal philosophy, of the break-up of the 
movement of things into atoms of experience. 
But as the whole process of the intellectual 
construction of the world, though incapable of 

117 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

justification from any point of view outside of 
itself, is yet unavoidable and intellectually 
compelling, because to depart from it is to 
commit intellectual suicide, so the application 
of the same method in art, resulting in the con- 
ception of the unity of character, and of unity 
in construction, will remain unshaken, being in 
fact no other thing than the necessary working 
of human nature in art. If in life we must 
accept the great guides of life, rationality and 
sympathetic intelligence, so we at least may 
accept the same guidances in the world of the 
imagination, and add to the charm of irides- 
cence and the exhilaration of stimulated nerves 
the beauty and strength of composition and 
idea. 

The manifestation of character, of course, 
is action. We know people by their actions; 
and first of all by their deliberate actions. 
Plainly it is in one point of view fair to judge 
characters by what men do when they con- 
sciously and clearly intend what they are 
doing. Men say of an act of impulse or pas- 
sion, "I was not myself when I did that." It 
is by their choices, Aristotle declares, that the 
characters of men are judged. Our ideal is 
what we consciously pursue; and our ideal is 

118 



CHARACTER 

part of our character, even though we never 
attain it. A shrewd and careful observer of 
men in practical life forms his judgments of 
his associates slowly and after many correc- 
tions by their stable intentions, forgiving much, 
passing by much, in order to depend upon the 
second thoughts, the real self, of his friends. 

So in books, we know people by their clear 
and well thought out purposes: as Dobbin in 
Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond are conscien- 
tious gentlemen by deliberate purpose. "Psy- 
chological" novelists, as they are called, de- 
pend upon the deliberate actions of their char- 
acters to make clear their inner nature. That 
they may exhibit the motives of their charac- 
ters, they represent the characters as perfectly 
clear about their motives, and extremely defi- 
nite in carrying out their purposes into action. 
The result is often curious and abnormal, al- 
most uncanny, in its distinctness, for human 
beings are not generally very reasonable or 
very conscious about most of their actions. 
George Eliot's novels afford conspicuous exam- 
ples of this exceedingly deliberate form of 
action, and her characters, especially the char- 
acters of whom she most approves, are pro- 
portionally unhealthy in their searching of 

119 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

themselves, and the monstrous distinctness of 
their vital processes. Their moral skins are 
taken off, and their living muscles and nerves 
laid bare flinching and quivering before their 
own eyes. Still more, at the most crucial points 
in the story, at the points of greatest tension 
and excitement, when the action should proceed 
rapidly to its culmination, the movement of 
the narrative is precisely the contrary. It 
becomes slow and detailed in the extreme in 
order that the moral problem created by the 
events preceding may be exhaustively analysed. 
Thus Romola, though beautifully and power- 
fully conceived, becomes slow and chilly; and 
even in the earlier and fresher novels, even in 
Adam Bede and Middlemarch, the pencil is 
bluntest where it should be sharpest, the cli- 
maxes are inadequate in energy to the richness 
and life of the setting and connective portions. 
Although from one point of view deliberate 
action reveals the character more justly than 
impulsive action, from another point of view 
impulse is a truer index of character than con- 
sidered choice. " There are some things a fel- 
low can't do." There are some things upon 
which a man of a certain character cannot even 
deliberate. A decent man does not deliberate 

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CHARACTER 

about picking a pocket, though he might steal 
on impulse. The highest and the basest acts 
are impulsive ; — ' ' instinctive, "aswe say : mar- 
tyrdoms, self-sacrifices, triumphantly success- 
ful deeds of brilliant achievement, as well as 
murders and betrayals, are done upon impulse. 
They have been long and unconsciously pre- 
pared for, and show what a character is, not 
what it is becoming, whereas the deliberate act 
may reveal tendencies which are victors but 
not yet conquerors. Morally the impulsive act 
may be higher or lower than the deliberate 
act; it may come from excited nerves or from 
the depths of the nature. There were two 
clergymen in a stage overturned in the West; 
a younger man, new in the ministry and an 
aged, pious, and kindly missionary, who had 
travelled many thousand miles and suffered 
many hardships in devoted labour for the good 
of others. When the two found themselves out 
of the stage, breathing hard, the elder man 
saw the younger wiping blood from his face. 

"Why," said he, "are you hurt? How did 
it happen?" 

The other looked at him strangely, and as 
he took away his handkerchief, the old clergy- 
man saw the mark of his own boot-heel on his 

121 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

younger brother's cheek. Thenceforth, I sup- 
pose he had new knowledge about humanity. 
His impulsive act revealed what an unknown 
nature he carried within himself; but I cannot 
believe that it revealed his true self to him. 

A reprobate drunken engineer suffers an 
agonizing death by fire in order to save the 
lives of the hundreds of women and children 
on a river steamer. An impulse of power from 
some depth below consciousness welled up 
within the man and bore him upon its crest. 
And no account of character can leave out this 
element and be true to humanity. 

In the great works of imaginative literature 
as in life, these impulses manifest themselves 
in crises, — at moments when there is no time 
or when the currents of life run too strongly 
for deliberation. Thus characters in genuine 
tragedies, in the works which most powerfully 
and most permanently command the imagina- 
tion, — Lear and Cordelia, Antigone, Anna 
Karenina, Eichard Feverel, — though they may 
have long deliberated, act on impulses leaving 
them no choice, act. as they must, considering 
what they have grown to be. In Sir Walter 
Scott's novels his deliberating characters, in- 
troduced that the reader may sympathetically 

122 



CHARACTER 

apprehend that there are two sides in the great 
contest which is the theme of the story, con- 
sider which side they shall take, and shift, it 
may be from Bonny Prince Charley to Hano- 
verian George. They impress us as imbeciles 
like Waverley, or nonentities like Ivanhoe or 
Osbaldistone. His active and interesting char- 
acters, rascals sometimes, and always stained 
or tainted men, — Marmion, Rob Roy, or Claver- 
honse, act with energy and decisiveness at the 
crises of the story. "In spite of myself,' ' as 
he himself declares, "my rogne always turns 
out my hero." 

Habitual action fills a large part of real life. 
It is the main source of moral strength, and it 
releases the mind that it may live in a free 
world, and deal with truly interesting subjects. 
Now habit is neither deliberate nor impulsive. 
It is "second nature," not the less natural be- 
cause it is acquired, and in a degree artificial. 
But in books habit is uninteresting, because it 
is fixed. It is mainly our own daily habits, our 
dulness, our monotonously repeated impres- 
sions and experiences, from which we wish to 
escape in books, and which the novelist instinc- 
tively omits. For habit is static, and hence 
without power to excite fear or curiosity. 

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THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

Therefore in novels habit takes a minor place. 
It is one element in the tone, the ground colour, 
of a character, as Adam Bede's singing of 
Bishop Ken's morning hymn gives the impres- 
sion of his pure and sober steadfastness, not 
dull and unimaginative, but possessed of an 
ennobling ideal. Habit, in particular, is often 
a means of accentuating particular features of 
a character for comic effect, as Dickens labels 
his characters by external habits, like the 
tickets on the figures of an old-fashioned cari- 
cature. Captain Cuttle " makes a note of it," 
Mrs. Gamp refers to Mrs. Harris, Mrs. 
Cruncher " flops,' ' and her husband forbids her 
to flop. But it is only the grotesqueness of 
these habits which redeems them from tedious- 
ness, and the less extraordinary iterations of 
admirable characters, meant to raise a sympa- 
thetic smile, — Mark Tapley's " Jolly!" and Mr. 
Cheeryble's " Don't you, Brother?" soon be- 
come very flat. 

In actual life we "know" people, that is, 
form our personal visions of them, not so much 
by these gross and plain and large totals of 
movement that we call acts, as by little things, 
— acts indeed, as we see if we consider them 
closely, but minute, not obvious acts, — by ways 

124 



CHAEACTEE 

of standing, firm or shaky or shifting, by ways 
of grasping the hand in salutation, by the mus- 
cular movements which give expression to the 
eyes, by smiles, by the tones of a voice. The 
scriptures speak of a man with a "high 
stomach"; slang used to speak of a "chesty" 
man; one youngster whom I knew had the 
reputation of having the laziest bach in col- 
lege. But it is not even by these things, by 
"little nameless unrembered acts," — unremem- 
bered, indeed not separately observed, that we 
form our most delicate judgment of character. 
We judge people by their choice of words, or 
of neckties ; by the delicacy of their finger-tips, 
by the lines in their faces, which say, "I have 
suffered for others," — "I have indulged my 
lusts," — "I have thought," — "I have dyspep- 
sia." Perhaps we form judgments as much as 
in any other way by the impression of phys- 
ical qualities easily apprehended, though not 
easily named, by a certain ivory pallor, by bony 
knuckles, by a "slab cheek and an oyster eye." 
These are the things that make us say : 

" I do not like thee, Doctor Fell; 
The reason why, I cannot tell; 
But this I know, and know full well, 
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.' 7 

125 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

It is a characteristic of modern prose that 
in all fields it strives to reproduce emotional 
effects by suggestion ; to give the special shiver 
of the scene, to reproduce the special thrill of 
the moment. So the novel of recent years 
strives more than the earlier novel to suggest 
the atmosphere of a personality, the quality, 
touch, feeling of it. This is what Dickens's 
labels are meant to do, a trifle mechanically — 
Mr. Carker's teeth and the dimples in the 
Marquis's nose when he grew angry; this is 
the object of Meredith's more delicate reitera- 
tion that Clara Middleton is "a rogue — in por- 
celain, ' ' and that ' ' Sir Willoughby has a leg. ' ' 
It is the aroma and the warmth of personality 
that give the charm to Mr. Hardy's description 
of Bathsheba Everdene on top of the wagon, 
looking at herself in the little swing mirror, 
merely to enjoy the reflection of her own 
beauty. The same writer intimates the refine- 
ment and grace of Fancy Day by a hundred 
touches, among them the delicacy of her slim 
boot-last. 

Sometimes the intimation of character is 
effected by the sudden flashing rightness of a 
single phrase, sometimes by a thousand soft 
touches of suggestion, but always imagina- 

126 



CHAEACTEE 

tively, not by the accumulation of what is in- 
tellectually perceived to be significant. Thack- 
eray's easy and triumphant method is espe- 
cially noteworthy for its power in suggesting 
character by the less tangible features of its 
manifestation ; — its tone. So we know his per- 
sonages by their ways and looks at least as 
much as by their deeds, — Beatrix, with her 
lustrous and melting brightness, Dobbin with 
his clumsy big hands and feet; we see the 
Colonel, the Baroness, and Mrs. O'Dowd, and 
how many more figures, gracious or quaint, to 
whom we turn back in thought as to acquaint- 
ances left behind in some town where we lived 
long ago. The Forsytes of Mr. Galsworthy 
are all pale, all have a sense of property and a 
certain steadfastness of chin; all are alike in 
solidity and mundane fitness, and all are dif- 
ferent. The very joint at their festal dinners 
is symbolic. As the reader comes to know 
them, he seems to be divining something half 
hidden, and has the same indistinct inexpres- 
sible fringe of impression about them as about 
his daily acquaintance. 

The conscious and complete physical descrip- 
tion of a character is a frequent means by 
which writers intend to communicate their 

127 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

impressions, but it is not likely to be effective. 
The orderly and rational symmetry of such 
description is too conscious and too cool: it 
rouses no stir of feeling. Moreover it seldom 
has unity, the real unity of evolution from 
within. The attention refuses to hold the first 
detail until the last is reached, and commonly 
also loses the whole in the parts. Even in Sir 
Walter Scott, his mechanically complete and 
elaborately outfitted personages, — Eebecca with 
her turban and simarre and agraffe, — would 
chill the warmth and check the current of any 
stream of invention less copious and powerful 
than his own. Sometimes these elaborated de- 
scriptions are false and manifest a lack of 
imagination of the whole scene, an abandon- 
ment to a childish delight in detail. For exam- 
ple, as Professor Maigron points out, when the 
palmer Ivanhoe enters the dusk of a firelit 
room, he is described to the thongs on his 
sandals (which would be out of sight below the 
table). 

But when written with enthusiasm and im- 
aginative intensity, even a pretty long descrip- 
tion may hold together from beginning to end, 
though more by its fire than its system. Mr. 
Thomas Hardy's detailed account of Eustacia 

128 



CHAEACTEE 

Vye in The Return of the Native, " fitter to be 
a goddess than a woman," is a series of dis- 
coveries, exciting and somewhat alarming. The 
long description never lets the reader drop his 
attention, and its progress, from the sugges- 
tion of slumberous fire in her somewhat heavy 
but noble figure, to the darkling nocturnal look 
of tragedy in her face, maintains a tension of 
questioning anxiety which causes the reader to 
forgive even the pedantry of describing the 
curve of her lips as a "cima recta or ogee," and 
of the reference to the "ulex Europaeus." 

In addition to inferring people from obser- 
vation, we know them by report and by the 
impression they produce on others. Indeed, a 
cloud of impressions hangs about every man 
in real life, his reputation making up a great 
part of the vision of him in every man's mind. 
This reputation is as much a part of one 's per- 
sonality as one's manners or one's coat. 
Likewise in books; the characters of great 
persons in historical novels, are manifested by 
the impressions produced on others, especially 
on the heroes. Lincoln in The Crisis, and 
Elizabeth in Kenilworth are examples. In 
Eichardson's Pamela we know Pamela by what 
Mr. B. thinks of her, and by what Lady Davers 

129 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

thinks of her, and by what the Countess thinks 
of her, and by what Lady Davers thinks of 
what the Countess thinks of her, and by what 
the Countess thinks of what Mr. B. thinks of 
her. A kind of image of the characters is spun 
in this way, a gossamer image, shimmering 
and light, but very real. 

In brief, we know people in novels by the 
same means and with the same sense of reality 
as we know actual persons. Moreover in some 
ways we know them better. The novelist can 
enter the minds of his characters and expound 
their thoughts and motives. Dickens knew 
what Jonas Chuzzlewit thought after he had 
committed the murder in the wood ; he tells the 
reader Jonas 's feelings about the storm, about 
the leaves on the trees, traces his dread into 
the hidden places in his mind, and reveals the 
most secret feelings of his dark nature. So 
George Eliot tells us flatly what Tina (in Mr. 
GilfiVs Love Story) thought as she fondled the 
dagger in the garden. 

Now it may be admitted that it is an evidence 
of inferior talent or of haste and lack of 
preparation to make much use of the abstract 
method of presenting character. An imagina- 
tive gift may be conceived so great and intense, 

130 



CHARACTER 

and a concentration of mind so energetic, that 
the exposition of character becomes needless, 
disappears in the vividness with which the 
character is realized. Tolstoy, for instance, 
much as he deals with ideas, seldom intrudes 
analysis into the representation of his per- 
sonages, elaborate and subtle as their psy- 
chology is. But to attain his end he is obliged 
to make his books enormous; the reader feels 
lost in his vastness, or in that of Zola. Is it 
not possible that something might be said for 
the economy of space achieved by some 
analysis, some direct exposition of the inner 
movements of the characters, leaving the more 
energy for the most intense parts of the nar- 
rative? 

The expository method is colder and less 
likely to be exciting to the imagination than the 
so-called dramatic method, the manifestation of 
character by means of outward acts accom- 
panied by no comment. In practice, however, a 
modest amount of exposition is a sheer neces- 
sity in some intimate studies of character. As 
Shakespeare was obliged in order to communi- 
cate the inner life of Iago or Juliet to resort 
to the unnatural device of a soliloquy, so Eliot 
or Hardy or Wells is simply forced to tell us 

131 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

frankly the motives and the thoughts of Hetty 
or Tess or Hilda. And the reader, once the 
illusion is created and the movement of the 
narrative has begun to carry him along with 
it, once he cares about the character, may well 
find the analysis of the character as exciting, 
indeed as dramatic, as any obviously striking, 
external event. The analysis becomes to him, 
as to the writer, a series of discoveries, — a 
sequence; the development of it is itself a 
plot. 

Though a character is sometimes reasoned 
out, like a scientific hypothesis, in order to find 
an explanation for actions, it is never believed 
in until it is imagined — until by the synthetic 
power of the imagination it is made one with 
itself in all its parts, and made one with our 
own natures, as something the springs and 
sources of which we may not be able to define 
but can yet sympathetically apprehend, and 
can conceive of as possibly moving ourselves. 

The imagination of the reader creates the 
character as one thing not because it is a sym- 
bol or formula or expression of one over- 
mastering tendency, but a thing alive with a 
single life. So even personalities complicated, 
difficult, fumbling, unsure of themselves, or in- 

132 



CHARACTER 

articulate, — Silas Lapham or Rudin, — become 
very real and complete and single to us as a 
result of our imaginative re-creation of them. 
Even their inconsistencies appear inevitable, — 
just as we know that human beings are incon- 
sistent without ceasing to be coherent. On the 
other hand, a more profound inconsistency, an 
inconsistency which the mind refuses to ratify, 
results when a character goes contrary to its 
own fundamental direction and settled tend- 
ency. A reversal of the current of a man's 
whole nature is not to be effected without the 
intervention of an enormous force; and the 
adequate exhibition of such a reversal is one of 
the most difficult of problems. Only in a good- 
natured farce can such a change as Mr. 
Micawber's, for example, be tolerated, who has 
all his life been a kindly pompous dreaming 
idler in London, and becomes a successful man 
of affairs the minute he lands in Australia. 
Dickens on the whole abuses the novelist's 
privilege of assuming impossible data in the 
creation of his characters, for the purpose of 
using the characters as machinery in his novels. 
He manufactures men of business who are 
impossibly childish in Mr. Pickwick (the guile- 
less innocent, as Bagehot observes, had made 

133 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

his own fortune!) and Cheeryble Brothers; and 
he gives impossible purity to a street waif, 
Oliver Twist. His purpose is to create the 
special setting and emotional quality of his 
novels. His success is not derived from these 
characters, but depends on the situations which 
their existence makes possible for the really 
interesting personages, — for Sam Weller, or 
for Fagin. Without Mr. Pickwick's simplicity, 
Sam Weller 's sharpness would lose its best 
opportunity, and its most effective foil; and 
by Oliver's sweet simplicity and helpless inno- 
cence, the vileness and cruelty of Fagin are 
given play to act, and receive the emphasis of 
contrast. 

It is very plain that if the writer first and 
the reader after him create characters by the 
imagination, there must be something in com- 
mon which serves as the material for the 
thought of both. This common element is 
human nature. No writer can create imagina- 
tively a character the possibility of which he 
cannot find within himself. It does not follow 
that in fact he ever himself could be the char- 
acter in actual life. Shakespeare, with his 
"large and comprehensive soul," included all 
his characters, but he could probably not have 

134 



CHARACTER 

actually submitted to be any one. He could 
not have been Richard III, for instance, be- 
cause his nature had something within it that 
would have prevented him from obeying the 
impulse to draw power to himself at any cost, 
to exercise any cruelty, in order to manifest his 
own intellectual force. But he could think what 
it might have meant to him to be thwarted and 
embarrassed by a physical deformity, he could 
feel within himself the desire for power and 
deference, he could feel that if he could but 
cast aside some scruples he might make that 
desire the sole guide of his course, he could 
understand envy and hate and cruelty. He 
could think of himself as a king's son, he could 
conceive himself intellectually gifted above 
others, and resolved to make his ability mani- 
fest by ruling over others. In brief nothing 
could be present in Richard the elements of 
which he had not in his own mind, though the 
full growth of them might not have been per- 
mitted by opposing forces within himself. 
Could any man not a poet create the poetic 
temperament of Winterbourne and find words 
to express that which he never uttered! 
Could any one not capable of imagining his own 
special powers and graces taken away, and 

135 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

himself reduced to basic torpidity, create the 
mumbling gaffers and clowns of Hardy's Wes- 
sex? Of a reader no such absolute manyside- 
edness is required; but in his degree he must 
at least make out by his own nature what he 
should do if he were as the characters of im- 
agination are, or they are unreal to him. All 
imaginative creation accordingly assumes a 
common basis of human nature, a common psy- 
chology. It is indeed by the imaginative effort 
required to make the difficult and remote pos- 
sibilities of humanity our own that literary 
study affords its chief ethical discipline. 

The sympathetic reading of imaginative 
works will not of itself gird up our loins and 
tone our moral fibres, or contribute to efficiency 
and moral energy, but it encourages tolerance 
and the understanding of others. It is a 
humanizing study: it reveals and develops 
that which men have in common, not that which 
separates them, and tends to make men there- 
fore better able to live in the community of 
civilized life. Indirectly, too, it probably tends 
to refine the moral judgments, by making those 
things appear lovely that are lovely. Thus it 
contributes to the sweetness and beauty of life, 
if not to its force and energy. 

136 



CHARACTER 

The " probable' ' in character is that which is 
ordinary in humanity, and the " exceptional' ' 
or " marvellous" is the individual tendency to 
difference. Frank R. Stockton wrote a novel 
called The Hundredth Man, the theme of 
which is the theory of one of the characters 
that about one man in a hundred is extraor- 
dinary ; and the narrative deals with his search 
for the hundredth man. In the story every 
person gradually manifests some eccentricity 
entitling him to be called a hundredth man. But 
though it is no doubt true that every human 
being is unique, it is no less certain that some 
human beings are more unlike the rest of the 
world than others. It is plain that the more 
extraordinary the person, the more interesting, 
if he is humanly intelligible at all. Hence we 
prize narratives dealing with personalities in 
any way distinguished from the ordinary, if 
we can make them real to ourselves. Such are 
Jean Val jean's sufferings and forgiveness, 
Christlike, save that he had sinned, Dugald 
Dalgetty's nut-cracker obstinacy and queerness, 
the steadfast colossal meanness of the Abbe 
Troubert in The Cure of Tours, and the 
sumptuously but pitifully selfish Eustacia Vye. 
The works which contain such characters are 

137 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

more interesting to most people than works 
equal in other points of excellence but not dis- 
tinguished by equally extraordinary charac- 
ters, certainly than the novels of the pedestrian 
Trollope, or even than those of the brilliant 
Miss Austen. 

But if the extraordinariness of the characters 
goes beyond what the reader can sympathize 
with, it becomes not interesting but shocking or 
disgusting. Thus a mad hero is inconsequen- 
tial, but the process by which a mind in un- 
stable equilibrium is overturned may be most 
interesting. Rogozin in The Idiot is of little 
interest, however painfully he is commented on, 
because after all he is not sufficiently normal 
and complete to be clearly comprehended; but 
the lovable Idiot, Prince Muishkin, who is 
made to endure so much so simply is interest- 
ing and credible. We suffer with him, and can 
understand how from the bed on which Nas- 
tasia lies "with a little wound under her left 
breast, where only a spoonful of blood came 
out," he can never go away an understanding, 
sane man. And as for Nastasia herself, what 
more easy to follow than the course of her 
brilliant, intense nature through her painful 
humiliations, her exaltations of devotion, to 

138 



CHABACTER 

sheer maniacal excitement, and the desire for 
insane revenge and for insane atonement! 

It is not quite true that a completely 
criminal nature is beyond the pale of intelli- 
gent understanding and sympathy; for all of 
us can understand from within ourselves 
cruelty, outrage, unbridled ambition, the desire 
to wrong our neighbours, and every anti-social 
impulse. Yet criminal characters of so ex- 
treme a nature that they have no unselfish 
interest require so great an effort to be firmly 
conceived, require the casting off of so many 
inhibitions, that they commonly impress us as 
insane, as beyond the ken of normal minds. 
Such creations, then, are on a relatively low 
plane of imaginative creation. The extraor- 
dinary in them is so little blended with the 
probable that in books they impress us as vio- 
lent efforts of the will, as unreal and harsh, 
that is, as lacking in the blended unity of 
natural things. Many writers have delighted 
in the attempt to create a complete and unre- 
lieved villain : a moral monster which probably 
exists, and fascinates the imagination. As the 
central figure in a book, such a being throws it 
out of balance and makes it false and violent. 
Thus it is with Fielding's vigorous Jonathan 

139 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

Wild, in which the traits, as Fielding declares, 
of an Alexander — his megalomania, selfish- 
ness, energy, and leadership — are attributed to 
a cruel thief, the organizer of a band of thieves. 
The book is a marvellously solid piece of con- 
struction, credible, observed with the utmost 
definiteness of vision, and energized by Field- 
ing's grave and powerful irony. But it is not 
a great book, because its main character can- 
not be brought into sympathy with normal 
human ways of thinking and acting. The same 
thing is true of Thackeray's more subtly but 
no less powerfully drastic Barry Lyndon — the 
squalid tale of a gambler — or Catherine, the 
story of a peculiarly vile murderess. These 
narratives are not sufficiently human, not cen- 
trally true enough, to take place with the great 
normal works of the imagination. 

Another type of work in which the author 
depends for the strangeness creating excite- 
ment upon characters extremely variant from 
normal humanity is one in which the personali- 
ties are excessively open to disturbance from 
impressions, "morbid" persons. The art of 
Hawthorne, exquisite and at one with itself, 
impresses me, I must admit, as thus "morbid." 
It seems to depend upon the peculiar sensitive- 

140 



CHARACTER 

ness of uncommonly delicate nerves, uncom- 
monly exalted above normal experience. 

In the work of Dostoevsky, a predilection for 
nervous invalids is to be found. They more 
than others are impressible and sensitive to the 
experiences of life; and they lend themselves 
the better to the impressionism, suppleness, 
and manifoldness of the art of the late nine- 
teenth century. But in spite of this advantage, 
they unbalance and weaken the novels of which 
they are the central persons. Even though a 
more stable type of character may not be 
central, the very greatest works realize it as 
normal in the surrounding order of life. 

As has been said, all art is a simplification 
of nature. This truth has been considered with 
reference to the fable ; but it holds as well with 
regard to character. A character in life is an 
exceedingly variable, fluctuating, plastic, com- 
plex thing; it may well be that every human 
being is of infinite complexity. Who can know 
the depravity, or the nobleness, or the perver- 
sity possible in the nature of any human being? 
Such complexity, the complexity of nature's 
infinite resources, is beyond the power of im- 
agination to create. Yet the novel since it ap- 
proaches reality strives to make its characters 

141 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

as much like those of real life as may be, to 
leave with the readers an impression like that 
produced by the subtle outline and complex 
substance of human nature as it is in actual 
experience. The main characters in novels are, 
therefore, in general relatively complex, the 
more complex the more nearly the novel ap- 
proaches the effect of actuality. The romancer 
may deal with simplified characters — Long 
John Silver, or Leatherstocking — but the 
realist must suggest the complexity of reality, 
must represent characters which have not only 
outlines, but shadows and tints, like Hilda 
Lessways, or Pendennis, or Vezukhov. Com- 
plexity in itself, moreover, is a source of inter- 
est, in character as in every other element of 
the novel. Thus, speaking generally, the more 
realistic the novelist, the more subtle and com- 
plete his characters, and the finer the differ- 
ences between them. So in Scott's romantic 
novels the main characters, Brian de Boisguil- 
jbert, or Jessica, or Vich Ian Vohr, or Allan 
Farebrother, are simpler than Miss Austen's 
Lizzie and Jane, or Thackeray's Pendennis, or 
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Vorontzov. 

Yet some simplification is a necessary part of 
the work of the imagination. The vision of the 

142 



CHARACTER 

artist, creating his world anew, gives it a pat- 
tern of some distinctness, an ordering and 
therefore a simplicity not to be found in nature. 
The extreme of this simplicity in character is 
the clear and beautiful pattern of ideal litera- 
ture. The types of humanity which appear in 
Homer's Iliad, or in Genesis, are simple men, 
and in them the fixed unchanging elements of 
the emotional life of man are vividly presented. 
The characters of Greek tragedy are specially 
clear examples of this idealizing simplification. 
In them the personages are great energetic 
natures, beautiful and human, but at one with 
themselves, carried along by powerful currents 
of nature with or against fate, — warm, intense, 
and real, but simple. They are far more than 
mere incarnations of passion, but their natures 
are at the time of the play dominated by the 
rule of some single overpowering tendency, 
and they are thought of mainly as expressing 
it. The characters of French tragedy are like- 
wise patterned with simplicity, a simplicity 
more intellectual, more analytic, in which the 
personages are more conscious of the problems 
of their lives, and less completely the human 
expression of them. The fallen angels of Mil- 
ton's Paradise Lost illustrate in their way the 

143 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

same idealizing simplification; they are mag- 
nificent architectural cartoons of men of great 
affairs: Moloch the committee-man of direct 
action, Belial the committee-man who works by- 
indirection, Beelzebub the strong, powerful, 
shrewd, conciliatory manager of a party, Satan 
the splendid, selfish leader of it. (The devils 
at least did not suffer the uttermost torment, 
that of doing business with the devil lower than 
Belial, the committee-man who will not meet 
an issue, but endeavours to kill action by 
technicalities and details.) 

This is ideal simplifying, in which human 
nature is made grand by stress upon its fun- 
damental emotions and great stable types. 
There is a false simplification, an imitative and 
external simplification. The true ideal simpli- 
fication is due to the simple way in which the 
writer imagines men, and the false simplifica- 
tion to the judgment and will of the writer, 
who perceiving the power of the ideal £gures, 
resolves that his imaginations shall be like 
them. He follows convention, as they follow 
reality, the reality of their own vision. Not 
being gifted with the intellectual and emotional 
energy requisite to imagine such simple figures, 
he cannot create them, and he makes only cold 

144 



CHARACTER 

imitations. The danger, then, of the conscious 
effort for heroic simplification is coldness and 
superficiality. There are a hundred forgotten 
epics and didactic poems of this sort, like 
the Davideis or Gondibert, which in spite some- 
times of high poetic merit in detail are too cold 
and too made to hold the interest of any reader 
except as curiosities. The simplification of 
ideal beauty emphasizes but does not distort 
the fundamental elements of human nature. 
There is another simplification of character, a 
simplification which distorts by emphasizing 
quaint and special peculiarities. If the 
ideally simple characters of august poetry, bare 
human nature unfallen, uncursed, are like noble 
sculptures, these grotesquely simple persons are 
like caricatures, figures all teeth, all eyes, all 
neck. There are Japanese deformed figures, 
with atrociously long feet or fingers twisted up 
to form candlesticks ; or Italian personal carica- 
tures, in which a man with a long nose has a 
proboscis. Likewise in novels men may be 
caricatured, sketched in outline, their special 
features, particularly their oddities and weak- 
nesses, selected and insisted upon. Thus Bar- 
kis, Squeers, Pecksniff, and a hundred more 
of Dickens's characters are made general, 

145 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

vivid, and amusing above common life by the 
concentration, so to speak, of their life into a 
few channels. Some Pecksniff, or Weller, or 
Squeers diluted with much ordinary humanity 
had been observed by Dickens. He crystallizes 
the hypocrisy, the curious humour, the mean 
tyranny, from its solution. The character thus 
created is intenser than life; — more amusing 
and more energetic, because simpler. Such a 
method of creating character makes a book a 
comedy of what are called humours; that is, 
in which the personages are dominated by 
some trait or tendency and lose the normal 
proportions of humanity. 

Simplification if carried to its extreme pro- 
duces allegorical figures, the incarnation of 
abstract ideas, not imagined as living per- 
sonalities, but willed or thought out as expres- 
sions of doctrine. Thus some characters ap- 
pear in order to be absurdly jealous of the 
heroine, or to manifest a dreadful villainy from 
which her purity shall stand forth. This type 
of character is typical of the weaker aspect of 
romanticism. The characters in Dumas 's 
Three Musketeers, as Milady and Buckingham, 
are thus mechanically simple; they are ma- 
chines of the story, mere general terms or 

146 



CHARACTER 

blank checks, feminine villainy or the gallantry 
of a perfect gentleman, not persons. Thns it 
is generally with books meant to " teach a les- 
son," with the novels of Miss Yonge, for 
instance ; though the didactic impulse does not, 
in the case of the genuine story-teller, avail to 
destroy his imaginative power. The example 
of George Eliot is interesting, whose works ran 
steadily drier of life and carried a larger burden 
of the sand of doctrine, as her life advanced. 

Allegory is a waste of energy. If a symbol 
does no more than convey an idea, it is a vexa- 
tion ; it costs more and is less distinct than the 
direct communication of the idea. When once 
you have seen through the symbol, what value 
has it? If a novel teaches a lesson and no 
more, the lesson can be better and more clearly 
given as a lesson and without the novel. Only 
those symbols are tolerable in which the sym- 
bol and the idea are one, in which the meaning 
of the book cannot be really given apart from 
the whole book. 

Those novelists who have most abounded in 
generalizations and been most fertile in doc- 
trine, a class which includes most of our recent 
writers of distinction, — Mrs. Ward and Mr. 
Bennett and Mr. Wells, for example, — in so far 

147 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

as they are novelists have not only made their 
ideas incarnate in complete personalities, but 
have something more to give than the doctrine 
they preach. Their characters suffer and do 
and we suffer and do with them ; they move the 
human depths of nature, and not merely com- 
municate what Wordsworth called "valooable 
truths.' ' Even the greatest English allegorist, 
John Bunyan, owes his greatness not to his 
doctrine, but to his poetic nature. In very 
truth he apprehended his ideas as visions. His 
autobiography makes this fact plain in that 
tender and most touching vision of himself 
upon the hillside, beaten by the storm and striv- 
ing to enter the peaceful precincts of the sun- 
lit sheepfold which enclosed the poor women, 
true believers, to whose happiness he could not 
attain. The vision of the Den, the Way, the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death, of the De- 
lectable Mountains was not determined upon or 
worked out by his rational mind or his con- 
scious purpose, but was a fated impression 
governing him. He could not escape it, and 
had to write it down to lay its ghost, so to 
speak. If we compare with the obvious alle- 
gory of Bunyan the less boldly avowed alle- 
gory of a doctrinal novelist, for example of the 

148 



CHARACTER 

late E. P. Roe, we find illustrated the differ- 
ence between the true imagination, though 
working in the balder literary form, and the 
mechanical allegorizing temper masquerading 
in the aspect of realism. Certain passages in 
Barriers Burned Away are really vivid; they 
are commonly those which deal with things ob- 
served or studied from records. But the whole 
"gives itself away." The rich and brilliant 
Miss Ludolph incarnates the best of unbelief; 
Dennis Fleet expresses Christian faith. She is 
endowed with every gift but faith and humility ; 
but her life is hollow without them, and even her 
art is imperfect. Fleet is the perfect man, and 
necessarily a Christian. He is the Sir Charles 
Grandison of an inadequately educated and 
sincere Christianity forty years ago, to whom 
nice clothes, nice manners, and a nice time were 
almost as precious as the Gospel, who judged 
pictures by their sentimental story, and whose 
heart and mind were never rent by any agoniz- 
ing question about social justice or the order 
of the world. The defect of this teaching is 
that so far as anything appears, just about the 
opposite is as possible as what the author de- 
clares to be true. For if the will of the novelist 
in composing his story is at the service of his 

149 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

ideas of right and wrong, he can easily make 
the story come out as seems best to him. Fic- 
tion can be depended upon only for human 
truth grounded in human nature, and capable 
of being tested by fair-minded persons of ex- 
tensive experience. It teaches by revealing 
what we see to be true from our own conscious- 
ness, and not by demonstration through evi- 
dence; and the reader has a just grievance 
when an author takes advantage of him to ex- 
press a doctrine of expediency or experimental 
justice not grounded in the universal. One is 
always tempted to speculate whether the re- 
spectable Mr. Goodchild might not have failed 
in business, whether worldly success might not 
have been the reward, not of the Idle Appren- 
tice's idleness surely, but of some of the selfish- 
ness, rough violence, and boldness, of the dice- 
playing rascal. When things turn out " right' ' 
too easily, the reader is perversely inclined to 
question even the useful truisms of daily life, 
and the moral effect is then the very opposite 
of what the writer intends. On the whole, then, 
the writer is bound to obey his vision, to strive 
to see his vision as clearly as he can, and by 
no means to make one up for himself. 

Living things are single in their life and 
150 



CHARACTER 

organization, and at the same time complex in 
the phenomena of their life. They manifest 
life in a multitude of ways, but they manifest 
one life. So the art which comes nearest life 
has not a hard simplicity, a poor and definite 
singleness, but a blending of many things into 
one by the power of an energy from within. 
Thus it is with Fielding or with Thackeray. 
Their characters are of mingled qualities ; they 
are compounded of many simples. Sophia 
Western is a charming girl, rosy and sweet, 
and very gracious and kind. But she can rail 
with thoroughgoing downrightness and a ready 
vocabulary which quite surprise us, considering 
how lamblike she has been, until we reflect that 
Squire "Western's daughter must have heard 
and seen a great deal more than is set down 
in the book. Becky Sharp is keen and selfish 
and determined. She surprises herself and us 
by admiring her husband for the first time 
when his assertion of his own dignity causes 
him to overthrow at a stroke all her ingeniously 
based and carefully built up tower of hope ; and 
what complexity of motives may have caused 
her to smash the image of George Osborne in 
Amelia's obstinate heart, by revealing his 
faithlessness ? 

151 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

In novels, then, which most characteristically 
and completely realize the ideal of this special 
kind of imagination, the modelling is very high, 
the details are full and complete, the grada- 
tions delicate. With the main figure, the light 
falls full on the brow and the temples, the 
subtle roundness of the forms of which is deli- 
cately studied; the droop of the weary eyelids 
is drawn with perfect precision; the curves 
about the mouth are traced with full elaborate- 
ness. The whole personage stands out boldly 
and solidly on his feet. But how about the rest 
of the picture? Imagine everything in it 
painted as delicately and with the same subtle 
completeness. The result would be the dryness 
and the confusion of a photograph, in which 
everything being reproduced with equal fidelity 
and fulness, nothing is presented with force. 
The emphasis, being everywhere, is nowhere. 
Some things must be less emphasized; there 
must be a background, in order to make a fore- 
ground. But the background figures ought to 
have an interest, a quality, of their own. How 
may this problem be solved? How may the 
background characters be made unemphatic 
without becoming uninteresting? They must 
be sketched; that is, their outlines alone must 

152 



CHARACTER 

be drawn, but with some exaggeration. As the 
leaves of a tree cannot every one be painted in 
a picture, though their type may be suggested 
by a certain emphasis of the effect they pro- 
duce, so the background figures of a crowded 
book must be simplified, and some obvious de- 
tail in them must be emphasized, to make them 
contribute their part to the life of the whole 
without interfering with the total effect. Sd 
even those novelists who use the most full and 
balanced method of representing real and un- 
exaggerated characters distort their minor 
persons. Miss Austen paints splendid and 
simple fools; — Mrs. Bennet, or Mr. Collins. 
Thackeray delights in picturesque eccentrici- 
ties; — Foker or Costigan. Fielding gives dia^ 
grams for men ; — Thwackum and Square. 

In actual life men and women are not only 
complex but subject to change. We are modi- 
fied by contact with the world; we develop by 
experience ; if we are changed in no other way, 
we grow up, passing from infancy to manhood, 
from manhood on to old age and decline. We 
are not the same in sickness as in health. It 
is one aspect of the simplification of nature by 
art for its own purposes that the processes of 
change in human nature should be neglected^ 

153 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

and that characters should be represented as 
fixed, as static. Vividly to imagine one unusual 
and coherent personality is a distinguished 
achievement. "My Uncle Toby" by himself 
confers immortality on Sterne. To imagine 
not only one but many personalities interacting 
in social life; to imagine a society of people, 
is a stupendous act of power; it is the great- 
ness of Dickens, or of Scott. Now if this group 
of people creates an interesting composite 
action, real to the imagination, and in a true 
sense one, — if the interest of plot and character 
is balanced, — one of the highest intellectual 
achievements possible for a writer is per- 
formed. Hence the still unsurpassed greatness 
of Fielding in English fiction and of Balzac in 
French. Now if we do not stop here, if we 
look not only for really imagined characters 
and a worthy plot, but demand that the char- 
acters shall be modified, shall while remaining 
consistent with themselves, while remaining in 
the highest sense one, fluctuate or progress, — 
the mind which can create a work combining 
all these elements of excellence may well seem 
to us superhuman. In point of fact, this even 
distribution of interested attention is not to be 
found. The evolution of plot as in itself inter- 

154 



CHARACTER 

esting is unfriendly to the interest in charac- 
ter. A complicated progression of incidents 
contends with a complicated progression of 
psychological development. Those types of 
writing in which uncommon achievement is the 
chief subject of the author's attention, the 
novels of Scott, or Stevenson, require unchang- 
ing characters in order to make their climaxes 
effective. 

A step toward closeness to life is taken, and 
an advance in interest and complexity in the 
characters of a novel is manifested, when char- 
acters are conceived of as gradually exhibiting 
elements present in the germ from the first. 
Tom Jones, for example, is throughout the 
book which bears his name the same impul- 
sively " good-hearted' ' fellow, full of weakness 
and prone to error, but uncomplainingly sweet- 
tempered and kindly intentioned. As a boy 
when he fights to save Sophia's bird he shows 
the same qualities and heedlessly causes him- 
self to be misunderstood in the same way as 
when, grown to manhood, he befriends Black 
George, or brings Nightingale to do his duty by 
Nancy. His sensual, unregulated, kindly, lax, 
and ignoble manhood is really developed from 
his eager, heedless boyhood. He has not 

155 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

changed in any fundamental way, but he has 
grown up. After he is married he may behave 
better, but he will not change. 

A second and a more decided step is taken 
when the characters are conceived of as really 
changing, as really modified by experience. By 
this is not meant that in some points they act 
at the end of the story differently from the way 
in which they act at the beginnng, because now 
they know some facts of which they were 
ignorant then; but that in some points their 
motives have been changed, that the ground- 
work of their life is not what it was. Eliza- 
beth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Preju- 
dice do not really change in nature. They have 
learned to know each other and their own 
hearts better than at the beginning, but they 
are what they were. But Arthur Donnithorne 
in Adam Bede is changed, though George Eliot 
is very timid about exaggerating the amount of 
his change. He is stabler, and graver, and 
kinder, as a result of his youthful sin and sor- 
row. Tito Melema in Romola goes from one 
act of self-indulgence to another, takes always 
the way of apparent ease, and at the end of the 
narrative is capable of infamy from which he 
would have recoiled, of which he could not have 

156 



CHARACTER 

dreamed, at the beginning. These two illus- 
trations exhibit the limitations of George 
Eliot's treatment of change in character. She 
is entirely concerned with the growth or 
decadence of moral strength; and her art 
still has something of mere development, of 
mere evolution of tendencies already existent. 
Arthur learns to think of others and to consider 
the remote results of his deeds ; Tito habitually 
thinks of his own skin, and shirks thinking 
about the consequences ; Arthur is from the first 
essentially respectable, and Tito is from the 
first a good deal of a rascal. George Eliot's 
conception of character development is, there- 
fore, somewhat timid and narrow. A more de- 
veloped realism recognizes change as the most 
characteristic fact of human nature; change is 
response, and response is the sign of life. 
Thus fluctuation and modification in the char- 
acters is an element in the complex and stimu- 
lating art of Thomas Hardy, of George 
Meredith, as of Arnold Bennett and of H. G. 
Wells, of Tolstoy, or Gorky, or Barres. All 
the most notable recent writers are at one in 
this, however much they may differ in every- 
thing else. Arthur Pendennis is by no means 
a fixed personality; but compare him with Clay- 

157 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

hanger. How much more the plasticity of the 
latter is made a force in the book. Compare 
the two sisters in The Old Wives' Tale with 
Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Compare the 
Brothers Karamazov with the two Bedes. In 
all cases, though the later writer may not im- 
agine the characters more vividly or even more 
truthfully than the earlier, he sees them in 
a new way; with the advance in realism has 
come the conception of unity in progress, of 
change without contradiction. Here as else- 
where, the philosophy of evolution reconciles 
the idea of guiding tendencies with richness of 
varying detail. 



158 



CHAPTER V 

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

Most people apply the name of tragedy to any 
very sad or shocking or painful event, espe- 
cially one which has resulted in death. In the 
newspapers, not only a suicide, and a murder, 
but a street-car collision and even an accidental 
fall on the sidewalk may be called tragedies. 
Tragedy is thought of as that which causes 
grief, especially grief over death, and comedy 
as that which causes laughter, — laughter how- 
ever excited. But there are more than one kind 
of grief; there are many kinds of laughter — 
almost as many as there are kinds of men ; and 
some compositions make us weep and laugh 
both at once. Deaths, too, impress us differ- 
ently: consider the death of Carton in A Tale 
of Two Cities, that of Hypatia, that of Tito 
Melema, and that of Jehan Frollo in Notre 
Dame de Paris. Surely these are not all 
tragedies. 

Tragedy, in the view here maintained, is a 
name for a kind of composition expressing a 

159 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

certain special temper and mood; and this 
mood is more concerned with the characters 
than with the plot. Plot and character are not 
in general wholly separate creations. Some 
stories of a brilliant and exciting plot require 
mechanically definite characters of extreme 
wickedness or purity. But generally speaking, 
in natural and healthy stories the tone and 
spirit of the composition are given by the char- 
acters; the plots are such as fit the characters. 
And a tragic plot is that which fits the tragic 
character. 

What, then, are tragic characters! Aristotle 
affirms that they are "better" than the average 
of humanity, by which interpreters agree that 
he means more highly endowed, with greater 
minds, more splendid ideals, and above all more 
energetic wills than belong to most men. Such 
brilliant beings — human though above common 
humanity — are the heroes and heroines of 
Greek tragedy: Agamemnon, GEdipus, or Iphi- 
genia. Professor A. C. Bradley has almost the 
same thing to say of Shakespeare's tragic 
heroes; they are " exceptional " beings; Ham- 
let with his fineness of nature and speculative 
largeness of mind, Macbeth with his ecstasy of 
poetic vision, Lear with his hungrily affec- 

160 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

tionate heart and his impulsive power of 
leadership, even Shylock, with his capacity for 
grand wrath, are all "exceptional' ' natures. 
The "betterness" or "exceptionality" of these 
ill-starred noble beings is not in the moral 
propriety of their behaviour, which may be 
sinful, but in their great possibilities for good 
or evil, and especially in the impression they 
produce that from them some of the inhibitions 
or restrictions which thwart the full develop- 
ment of the ordinary man have been taken 
away. Commonly they will more ardently and 
more definitely than ordinary men, or if not 
they see life with strange detached clearness. 

Are the heroes and heroines of tragic novels 
thus raised above the commonplace? The 
novel has its walk within the bounds of daily 
reality; can it give scope to these "better,' ' 
these "exceptional'' beings of tragedy? To 
answer we need but to consider some of the 
great tragic prose fiction of the world. In the 
earliest of tragic novels, Clarissa Harlowe, 
Clarissa stands before us as a being radiant in 
the darkness, and pure in the midst of corrup- 
tion. The author conceives of her as not only 
beautiful, graceful, and charming, as not only 
endowed in no common measure with every 

161 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

womanly virtue, but as intellectually superior 
to the average alike of men and women, and as 
possessed of executive talent remarkable in any 
one, and especially in one so young. If she 
seems not to possess the will of initiative, she 
has the will of fortitude, and the dignity of 
unbroken courage and self-respect. In spite 
of her conventionality, even her common- 
placeness of ideas, she is a heroine, a being 
above the level of ordinary humanity, pure, 
sweet, tender, and noble. Like her, all the 
women of George Eliot's tragic novels are 
superior beings. Romola and Janet and Mag- 
gie Tulliver are all endowed with uncommon 
intellectual talents, moral force, and energy of 
will; and all are in point of fact brought to 
distress if not to calamity as the direct results 
of these fatal gifts. It is the same with that 
gracious figure of enthusiastic youth, Richard 
Feverel, and with the large-natured Tess, with 
Anna Karenina, and with the peasant Biittner. 
All are personalities of force or beauty or 
grace or insight, who stand above the plain 
level of humanity, and whose fate touches us 
with a dread of the mystery in the world, be- 
cause being noble they are therefore unfor- 
tunate. 

162 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

The secret of their misfortune is that by the 
very necessity of the case their very largeness 
of nature makes demands upon life above the 
ordinary and therefore the less likely to be 
gratified. The world that is has a little play, 
is a little crazy in every joint, and every being 
in it is not quite fitted to all the rest; and as 
the world is constantly changing, no man is 
fitted to it today, though he fitted it yesterday ; 
and everything in the world is perpetually 
being adjusted anew. Indeed the interest of 
the world is in its maladjustment ; a fixed and 
proper world with every creature entirely at 
ease in it would have nothing more to live for. 
It is the getting better of things that is ex- 
hilarating, the possible getting worse that is 
exciting. In this maladjusted world, the per- 
sons of greatest meaning are not those who fit 
it most perfectly, but may well be those who 
themselves ill adjusted to the world of the 
moment serve even by their sorrows to move 
the world to a new and better state, or may 
even be those who shake and test the order of 
the world by their crimes. Of the " better' ' of 
these beings the lot may be martyrdom, more 
or less complete; or it may be that the great 
sinners among them even by receiving due 

163 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

punishment shock and startle rulers, and are 
by their lives and deaths forces in the world. 
Many or most cannot be at one with them- 
selves or in all aspects equally powerful; and 
in human probability this crevice in their 
armour, this rift in the lute, may cause or may 
palliate their destruction. Hence the view of 
Aristotle, since his day much elaborated, that 
the tragic hero must be " better' ' than ordinary, 
must be on the whole deserving of approbation, 
but must have some flaw, some failing or de- 
fect within his nature, since misfortune befall- 
ing the wholly evil man will not be tragic, but 
merely satisfactory to the sense of justice, 
while the misfortune of the wholly good will 
disgust us, and provoke us to the thought that 
the government of the world is unrighteous. 
Accordingly many writers strive to reveal in 
Shakespeare's characters some weakness that 
brings each to destruction, however noble the 
character as a whole. Lear's impulsive petu- 
lance, Othello's credulity, Hamlet's hesitation 
are, in the view of these critics, each the flaw 
of a noble nature, a nature exposed to a stress 
too great to be endured by even these slight 
imperfections. 
In such speculations, plausible though they 
164 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

are, there is something mechanical, and indeed 
essentially false. It is not true that the tragic 
hero must be "on the whole good." Macbeth 
is certainly a great tragedy, and neither Mac- 
beth nor Lady Macbeth is "on the whole good, ' ' 
or "more good than bad." It is true that 
neither is entirely or mechanically wicked. 
They went wrong, but they might conceivably 
have gone very nobly right. Richard III, on 
the other hand, is not a tragedy but a tale of 
horror, a tale of dreadful deeds done by a man 
who is too inflexibly wicked for the tragic 
effect. The defect of King Eichard as a tragic 
hero is not that he is too wicked for the part, 
but that he is fixedly malevolent, mechanically 
evil. The tragic nature is a great nature with 
which normal men can sympathize, though they 
do not approve of it; not a mechanism but a 
living character; a human being conceivably 
different from what he actually is, conceivably 
adjusted to happier conditions than those which 
he has met. A great and unchangeably wicked 
man fascinates us, but touches us with neither 
fear nor pity. On the other hand, it is not 
necessarily the case that a tragic nature should 
be in some way flawed or weakened so that its 
fall is a result of its defects. Antigone, as 

165 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

Professor Butcher points out, is without a 
flaw, in any intelligible sense relating to her 
destruction. Her calamitous end is not due to 
her fault or flaw, but to the fault of circum- 
stances ; she tests the world, not the world her. 
Is not the fate of martyrs tragic? "They were 
stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, 
were slain with the sword : . . .of whom the 
world was not worthy . . . ' ' 

It is a narrow criticism that finds the 
calamity of Othello to have been induced by any 
defect of his or Desdemona's. Indeed, if he 
had been shrewder he would not have been de- 
ceived, but if he had been shrewder, he would 
not have been so noble. The defect is not in 
Othello, but in the conditions round him; in 
the puzzling state of the world; in universal 
weakness. The "pity of it" is the pity of the 
human lot. 

George Eliot, in an interesting memorandum, 
tells of the ideas underlying her poem of The 
Spanish Gypsy. She had been looking at an 
Annunciation attributed to Titian, and it had 
occurred to her that here was a new and great 
dramatic motive. "A young maiden, believing 
herself to be on the eve of the great event of 
her life — marriage — about to share the or- 

166 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

dinary lot of womanhood, full of young hope, 
has suddenly announced to her that she is 
chosen to fulfil a great destiny, entailing a ter- 
ribly different destiny from that of ordinary 
womanhood. She is chosen, not by any mo- 
mentary arbitrariness, but as a result of fore- 
going hereditary conditions : she obeys. ' Be- 
hold the handmaid of the Lord.' Here, I 
thought, is a subject grander than that of 
Iphigenia, and it has never been used. I came 
home with this in my mind, meaning to give 
the motive a clothing in some suitable set of his- 
torical and local conditions. . . . The subject 
had become more and more pregnant to me. I 
saw it might be taken as the symbol of the 
part which is played in the general human lot 
by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, 
and of the fact that what we call duty is en- 
tirely made up of such conditions ; for even in 
cases of just antagonism to the narrow view 
of hereditary claims, the whole background of 
the particular struggle is made up of our in- 
herited nature. Suppose for a moment that 
our conduct at great epochs was determined 
entirely by reflection, without the immediate 
intervention of feeling which supersedes reflec- 
tion, our determination as to the right would 

167 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

consist in an adjustment of our individual 
needs to the dire necessities of our lot, partly 
as to our natural constitution, partly as sharers 
of life with our fellow-beings. Tragedy con- 
sists in the terrible difficulty of this adjust- 
ment, — 

1 The dire strife 
Of poor Humanity's afflicted will, 
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny/ 

Looking at individual lots, I seemed to see in 
each the same story, wrought out with more or 
less of tragedy, and I determined the elements 
of my drama under the influence of these 
ideas. " 

No one today would think, as George Eliot 
does, of the double "claim" upon us as due to 
conflicting forms of heredity, or would be likely 
to find so stiff and technical a form of expres- 
sion for these ideas as she does; but does she 
not shadow forth, though obscurely, the deepest 
truth of this whole matter? Is it not true that 
all lives are in some degree unfulfilled because 
of an imperfect adjustment not only of every 
human being to circumstance, to "environ- 
ment," but of circumstances to each other, of 

168 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

the environment to itself; — is it not trne that 
"all creation groaneth and travaileth to- 
gether"! The sense of daunting cosmic mys- 
tery broods round us, but with it is present the 
sense that evil is alien to the universe, that 
there is going on a perpetual painful re-creation 
toward a more perfect world, so that the mind 
is not cast into blank despair by the failure of 
the good, or by the inherent imperfection of 
the universe in which we are a part. 

The elder tragedy — the tragedy before the 
novel — is in the main aristocratic. As the 
Monk says in Chaucer : 

" Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, 
As olde bookes maken us memorie, 
Of him that stood in greet prosperity 
And is y-fallen out of heigh degree 
Into miserie and endeth wrecchedly. ' ' 

The Greek heroes are the children of gods: 
human, indeed, and subject to pain and grief 
and death, but by virtue of their superhuman 
origin more beautiful and stronger and wiser 
than common men. Above all they are in 
some degree free from the restrictions which 
hem in the will of common men, and may 

169 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

express the force of their mighty characters — 
our characters written in bolder hieroglyphics 
— more freely than we can manifest the tend- 
ency of our natures. Just so their calamities 
are the more inevitable and the more tremen- 
dous. Their ancestry in its greatness carries 
a curse. Shakespeare's heroes are kings and 
princes, and in their lives, like the Greek 
heroes, may act out the more freely the full 
energy of their natures, — may more adequately 
than common men exhibit the intensity of 
their ambition, pride, or vengefulness, as well 
as of their magnificence, their tenderness, their 
powers of thought and action, matured in the 
full sunshine of worldly glory, and developed 
by their activity in great affairs. Even in his 
comedy, his respectable characters are at least 
merchant princes or " ladies richly left." The 
very exaltation of the heroes of the elder stage, 
Greek, English, or French, makes the contrast 
the more intense when their downfall comes. 
And as the effect of the contrast is increased 
by raising the hero in his day of prosperity to 
the highest point humanly attainable, to a 
place among the children of the immortals, or 
among the princes of the world; so it is in- 
creased by bringing him in his fall down to 

170 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

the very limit of human dread, namely to death 
itself; to death, the sharpest contrast and the 
most impressive event and the most definite 
conclusion in human experience. The men of 
old times knew death and death by violence 
familiarly as a present and continuous danger, 
and they intensely feared and hated the dread 
mystery, for if they had not they could not 
have continued. 

In our day the democratic constitution of 
society and a life of normal security, in which 
war is the horrible exception, have made 
natural another type of tragedy; a tragedy of 
less violence of outward contrast between its 
height and its depth, taking its heroes from 
ranks below the highest, and ending not always 
in death, but it may be in pain, or even in 
moral degeneration. Clarissa and Tess and 
Anna Karenina die, and must die; they had a 
right to die. Maggie Tulliver also dies, but 
without right or reason. Hetty Sorrel ought 
to have died. Romola lives, and ought to live. 
It is not death in any of these novels which 
constitutes their tragedy; it is the sense of 
mystery and largeness and terror. The novel 
of Romola is a tragedy not because Savonarola 
and Tito die, but because Tito is not fit to live, 

171 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

and because Romola's life is not fit for her; 
because the beauty of his nature wastes and 
degenerates and because the nobility of her 
nature leads to no end worthy of itself. In 
The Ordeal of Richard Fever el, the tragedy 
is not alone that Lucy dies, but that Richard 
lives on, the mere shell of a man. The tragic 
depth of martyrdom is that "the world is not 
worthy." Nor can we deny to such concep- 
tions the noble name of tragedy, provided the 
work embodying them creates the impression 
of a conflict, a necessary conflict, between a 
sincere nature and a universe to which it not 
only is not but cannot be adjusted, of a 
situation from which there is no true way 
out. 

Pity for the helpless is not the same with 
that sterner sense of sympathetic pity com- 
bined with terror evoked by the unsuccessful 
struggle of superior natures against fate which 
is the tragic feeling in the purest sense. As 
we have drawn one illustration from Paradise 
Lost so we may consider another. With the 
archangel fallen human nature cannot but sym- 
pathize. We men, imprisoned and baffled, but 
eager and desirous, cannot but feel the great- 
ness of his pain, and be struck with awe by his 

172 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

majesty, though dimmed and tarnished. But 
our first parents, — beautiful, tender beings, 
helpless and naked, the sport of forces invisible 
and unintelligible to themselves, and playing 
innocently in their enclosed garden, which was 
not so fortified against surprise but that the 
enemy could enter, — these figures, symbols of 
the experience of every human soul, how ap- 
pealing they are in their weakness! The 
novel abounds in examples of this gentle type : 
natures made to be played upon and destroyed 
unconscious, to be carried along with the 
downward rush of the forceful characters, the 
personages of will, or to be beaten on the rocks 
of an ocean too stormy for their strength. 
Such are Elgiva in A Pair of Blue Eyes; and 
with many such Dickens makes his appeal to 
us — Tom Pinch, the childish David Copper- 
field, and a multitude more of helpless chil- 
dren. Next after Dickens's humour, his most 
interesting contribution to the human temper 
is the sense of the individuality of children, 
their claims to an independent life of the soul, 
the horror of exposing these tender beings to 
the rough cruelty of ignorance, or to perver- 
sion, or to the tyranny of mean natures, or to 
the strife and pain which should be reserved 

173 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

for adult strength. Dickens set the example 
of the novel of pity. 

Pity, though not a modern invention, has 
been felt more and more intensely and more 
and more widely in the history of humanity. 
It is one important force in what we call the 
advance of civilization, that is, in the impulse 
to increased co-operation, in the art of living 
together in communities. It is the source of 
laws protecting women and children; of hos- 
pitals; of the care of the defective as a social 
duty; of the consideration that not only 
strength and happiness but weakness and 
helplessness create a claim upon society. 

The spirit of pity has created a new kind of 
imaginative composition, the work especially 
of the great Eussian writers who have ex- 
pressed themselves in the novel. The flame of 
pity did not burn unmingled in Dickens. His 
sentiment clouds the flame, his humour over- 
whelms it. In Dostoevsky and Tolstoy the 
sense of pity reaches a gravity and largeness 
which makes it sublime in its way. This is 
not the way of that which has been called 
tragedy in this book. But the cosmic tender- 
ness of the profound scenes of The Brothers 
Karamazov is not only melting to the soul, 

174 



TKAGEDY AND COMEDY 

but enlarging to it. In this work the world 
possesses the poetry of the 

" confederate storm 
Of sorrow barricadoed evermore 
"Within the walls of cities " 

which the soul of Wordsworth saw looming but 
indistinct. The world has lost because Words- 
worth did not turn upon the griefs which men 
suffer in the complexities of modern life the 
power of his brooding imagination, but re- 
treated from contemplating them. He had pro- 
claimed himself a 

1 ' happy man, 
And therefore bold to look on sterner things; " 

but his strength was not sufficient for the 
arduous vision, and he "put it by." 

The beauty and power of the two high and 
deep forms of imaginative composition which 
deal with the sorrows of mankind, tragedy and 
pathos, may suffer substitution or imitation in 
three ways: by unsound terror, — melodrama; 
unsound pity, — sentimentality; or false terror 
and pity, — perversion. 

Tragedy, resting upon characters of will, 
produces deeds of dread created by struggles 

175 



THE AST OF THE NOVELIST 

from within. Suppose the deeds without the 
souls ; marvellous acts performed by beings all 
of a piece, cast in a mould, incapable of change 
and wholly pure with a superhuman gleam, or 
wholly evil with demoniac consistency. Such 
are the narratives of Bulwer-Lytton ; such are 
The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Three 
Musketeers. In works like these, melodramas, 
the tragic deed is performed without the tragic 
nature, or the tragic spirit. To mark them as 
inferior to tragedy is not to condemn them: 
such works when consistent with themselves 
and frankly unreal are immense fun. It is the 
intrusion of the melodramatic spirit in dis- 
guise, or where it has no right to be, in oppo- 
sition to the spirit of the work that destroys 
inner consistency, and so sins against the fun- 
damental laws of the imagination. All that has 
to do with Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner is 
melodramatic; unreal, mechanical, excessive. 
So is Eosa Dartle in David Copperfield, a 
mechanism; so seems to me in spite of myself 
Lovelace in Clarissa Harloive. Externally 
brilliant and at times even deceiving, they have 
no inward fluctuation or evolution, reach no 
determining crisis, but are fixed from the first, 
— " fixed as in a frost." Their natures are not 

176 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

tragic, for the tragic being impresses us as 
capable of having done other than it does, as 
open to change and growth, as in general rebel- 
lions and energetic and modifiable. The great 
bad men of tragedy might have been great 
good men; its good men might have fallen. 
They present the power of conquest, of victory, 
of unity in tension and struggle, not in 
quiescence. 

The sentimental, likewise, is the unjustified 
or externally conceived pathetic. And the lack 
of justification consists primarily in the fact 
that the feeling is willed; — the great fault of 
writers who either resolving to have an emo- 
tion or to produce an effect, or else exaggerat- 
ing their own genuine feelings, sometimes con- 
tradict and sometimes go beyond nature. It 
would be too much to say that such sentiment 
is wholly insincere, but it is essentially false. 
Dickens thus excites and overloads his own 
natural gift of pity; and his Little Pauls 
justify the reserves with which his mighty 
genius must be regarded. 

But it is not alone the external and unim- 
agined pity which we call sentimental. It is 
that sense of sadness which is felt too easily. 
In this as in every other aspect of art it is not 

177 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

alone the force of feeling that is contagious, 
but the force of a feeling that has prevailed 
over a strong resisting power, — which has re- 
duced to itself a whole strong nature, and thus 
created the poise in tension, the unity of a con- 
trolling energy, which is the source of high 
artistic delight. Easy terror and easy tears 
are mere weakness. The fountain of tears 
must be found in strange regions, or must 
break forth from the rocks. The vision of life 
must be profound and the terrors of life must 
be serious to command the imagination. 

The perversions of tragedy and pathos do 
a deeper violence to the realities of human 
relationships. All serious arts manifest symp- 
toms of decadence when those who follow them 
try to create the effect of combined surprise 
and naturalness by paradox, especially by the 
creation of moral paradoxes in the nature of 
their heroes. Coleridge says well in his praise 
of Shakespeare, "He is in the highroad of life. 
He has no pure adulterers or tender-hearted 
murderers.' ' As it is a manifestation of his 
superior genius that he has power to reveal 
the strangeness of normal humanity, so it is an 
implicit confession of lesser creative force to 
depend upon the excitement of abnormality as 

178 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

the source of interest. The typical " romantic' ' 
hero wears sin as a crown or halo on his brow. 
He is not merely wicked, but curiously, nobly, 
or refinedly wicked. The list of these subtly 
blended spirits, the bouquet of whose moral 
natures is compounded of elements which are 
separately offensive, but which combined give 
a rare pleasure to the connoisseur, is a long 
one. There are Rousseau's virtuous seducer, 
and Mrs. RadclinVs mysteriously impressive 
bandits and inquisitors (ancestors of the 
Byronic hero). Even Scott's healthy but in- 
sensitive nature made a crude demand for 
paradox by making his " rogue his hero," from 
the "mean forger," Marmion, to the generous 
thief, Rob Roy. The same ideal is maintained 
by Bulwer and Dostoevsky. The heroes of 
these writers hover perilously between the 
comic and the disgustful. On the one hand, — 

" When the enterprising burglar isn't burgling, 
And the cut-throat isn't occupied in crime, 
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, 
And listen to the merry village chime." 

On the other hand, from beneath the fragrance, 
— the exotic fragrance of a special refinement, 
or the plainer cologne-water of a very tender 

179 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

sensibility, — one catches odours of the beast or 
of the sty. 

The romantic paradox of interesting* sin 
arises commonly from the attempt to build a 
tragedy upon the mere unfulfilled desire of an 
individual, from subordinating the large, the 
typical, from belittling the law and the uni- 
versal. But even the pathos of transitoriness 
depends upon being set against a background 
of permanence; and the spirit of tragedy is 
cosmic. When Bulwer strove to make con- 
sistent and sympathetic Eugene Aram, the 
tender-hearted murderer, he at least left the 
extent of his guilt in doubt, and blasted the 
heart which strove to live apart in intellectual 
loneliness. Dostoevsky has with bolder and 
more powerful genius followed in his steps, 
creating an order of society which is impossi- 
ble — which would split asunder. No doubt it 
is easy to believe — it is impossible not to be- 
lieve — in the corruption of noble natures by 
social wrong. No doubt there are benevolent 
murderers, pure harlots, drunkards who are 
gentlemen at heart — mad folk, poor things, 
most of them — but that the benevolent mur- 
derer, the pure harlot, the essentially high- 
hearted drunkard who has robbed his wife, 

180 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

should meet all casually in the same evening, 
almost at the same table, and that incidentally 
all the respectable people in the world of the 
novel should be shadows or hypocrites or idiots 
or machines; — the result is not pathos but 
vertigo. A society like that could not be, and 
if a miracle created it for an instant, it would 
explode the next. Crime and Punishment has 
the nightmare unreality of a thing every part 
of which is plausible, but the parts of which 
destroy the whole. Fantastic though it be, 
The Brothers Karamazov has more truth, be- 
cause it exhibits more contrast and manifests 
in the characters more rational strivings. 
u D'Annunzio's heroes are grown-up spoiled 
children who with the petulance of satiation 
must smash their superabundance of toys. 
Having assiduously cultivated what Plato calls 
the sickly part of their souls, they swell, like 
his tyrant's son, into riot if aught be denied 
them or if all be granted them. Such natures 
are unworthy of the augustness of death, in 
which they voluptuously delight; they are too 
soft for it. There is a way out for them in the 
mere external discipline of the jail or the ma- 
chine shop ; or they may be purged in the flame 
of war. 

181 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

The unreflecting view of tragedy and comedy 
simply opposes them, one as concerned with 
imaginations of pleasure, one with those of 
pain. But a brief consideration shows that the 
experiences which create comedy and those 
which create tragedy are not opposed but akin, 
or even identical; and that the opposition be- 
tween tragedy and comedy depends upon the 
point of view ; upon something in the mind, not 
in the things. The tragic spirit arises from a 
sense of maladjustment ; but is it not plain that 
the comic spirit also depends upon the recogni- 
tion of a maladjustment, an incongruity? Mr. 
John Kendrick Bangs in his lecture on humour 
told a story too poignant to be endured of a 
comic drunken woman in London exchanging 
speeches of high-flavoured wit with the police. 
Seeing a child watching her with a timid un- 
happy face he essayed to comfort her, saying, 
" Don't be afraid; she won't hurt you." 

' 'I know it," was the answer; "she is my 
mother. ' ' 

The woman, comic to the police and to the 
thoughtless spectator, was tragic to the child 
and the thoughtful spectator. 

Humour, then, resides not alone in the in- 
congruity, but in the perception of the incon- 

182 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

gruity. A jest is made not only by the jester 
but by the listener. It exists as a result of the 
way in which it is seen and taken ; it is created 
by being enjoyed. And the kind of joke a man 
enjoys depends on him : on his age, his health, 
his experience, his education, his race, his re- 
ligion, his politics, his philosophy. Thus there 
is much more diversity of types of humour 
than of tragedy, and much less general agree- 
ment upon what is genuinely humorous. Every 
nation has its humour : the English tending to 
be dependent on the situation, genial and often 
mingled with pathos, the French concerned 
with social types, intellectual and satiric, the 
German broadly good-natured, the American 
verbal and full of exaggeration. Proverbially 
every nation is likely to be unintelligent and 
unsympathetic towards the humour of other 
nations. Americans are obtuse to the humour 
of Punch, Englishmen are obtuse to American 
jokes, Scotchmen to English jokes. Nothing is 
more national than a comic paper; Punch and 
Fliegende Blaetter and Life and Le Eire. 
Some people are made very sad by the jests 
which tickle their friends. Puns, parodies, 
horseplay, or tavern tales which throw some 
people into fits of laughter make others wince 

183 






THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

or look down their noses. Some people are 
simply puzzled by Sam Weller or shocked by 
Falstaff. In brief, humour is a complex, indi- 
vidual thing; the sources of the greater pains of 
mankind are alike ; the sources of their laughter 
differ. Great tragedies appeal to all succeeding 
generations. They spring from emotions essen- 
tially the same in their source and their nature 
for all people. In few aspects of art is there 
progress, but there is progress in humour. 

The feeling of amusement, whatever else is 
to be said about it, is roused by the perception 
of an incongruity, by some violation of rational 
order, which we in no way fear, and in which 
our sympathies are on the winning side. Peo- 
ple are amused, for instance, by the incongruity 
of the actual fact with the normal fact. In the 
Middle Ages and the early Renaissance princes 
had dwarfs at court to amuse them. Now a 
dwarf is incongruous with our conception of the 
normal man, he is an unsuccessful attempt at 
a man; and we laugh at him if we do not sym- 
pathize with him but with the successful exam- 
ple, and are not afraid of him. So a man with 
a large nose or crooked teeth or a limp is 
amusing because his appearance is incongruous 
with normal human proportions; he " looks 

184 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

funny.' ' My friends would laugh if I should 
make an extraordinarily fine shot at billiards. 
It would be abnormal, but they would not be 
afraid it would happen again. Characters, 
likewise, that are eccentric or disproportioned, 
having in excess some normal quality, like the 
love of money or self-esteem or the desire of 
praise, are subjects of comedy. Such are the 
themes often of Dickens, or occasionally of 
Meredith. The mere fatness and sleepiness of 
the fat boy are funny; Sir Austin Feverel's 
orderliness, Sir Willoughby's regard for him- 
self are funny, just because they are abnormal 
and we do not sympathize. But as soon as we 
see that we do well to fear these things they 
cease to be funny ; and they may be portentous 
enough to be tragic. 

Amusement is excited by incongruity be- 
tween that which is and that which is wished. 
A boy sticks a beetle on a pin or holds a cat 
by the tail ; he laughs and laughs at their futile 
efforts to escape. It is not alone their pain, 
but much more the contrast between their will 
and their power which is amusing. A golf 
player slices; he is funny because he does 
something different from what he wishes to do. 
Any failure is funny to one who does not sym- 

185 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

pathize with the man who fails. Even every 
tragedy has a conceivably comic side. Macbeth 
was a joke to the witches; Othello to Iago; the 
blinded Gloucester to Regan. If the king did not 
fear Hamlet he would laugh at him. These 
are horrible jests ; this is the laughter of fiends. 
But the examples test our principle fairly; 
there is an element of the comic when we per- 
ceive an incongruity, a contrast between some 
rule and some exception, and sympathize with 
the winning side. 

There is comedy in an incongruity between 
the fact and belief; a credulous David Simple, 
who believes every tall story, a vain John 
Crosbie, who believes himself cleverer or more 
beautiful or better than he is, an egoist, a 
Willoughby Patterne who believes himself cos- 
mically more important than he is, — are all 
favourite objects of ridicule. The incongruity 
between fact and pretence, — Pecksniff's hypoc- 
risy, Scapin's deceit, — are comic. These human 
incongruities in character and act are the 
perennial sources of satire; Fielding goes so 
far as to say that hypocrisy is the sole proper 
object of satire, and Meredith sets his imps 
dancing about the figure of self-importance 
however disguised. 

186 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

Incongruity between the literal and the 
actual meaning of words is comic. Exaggera- 
tion, — a harmless exaggeration, not intended to 
deceive, — is the "note" of American humour: 
a gas bill like Butterworth's, of 1,500,000 feet, 
being 500,000 feet more than the total amount 
of gas made at the works during the month, 
or the warning to keep seed wheat dry, for fear 
a grain should swell too big to go into a bag. 
All the incongruities of language are rich in 
merriment, the unconscious ones of unforced 
delight, the intended ones of a humour that al- 
ways risks thinness, and smartness. The Irish 
bull (of theory; the "bull" of reality is likely 
to be an effort of intentional wit too subtle 
or too happy for the listener), the mixed 
metaphor, "Baboo English" and other incon- 
gruities of tone all make the listener happy. 
Parodies and mock-heroic poems amuse him 
with a tang of bitterness or contempt, or at 
least of condescension. Thinnest and coldest 
of humour is the mechanical play upon words 
manufactured commercially as "filler" for the 
newspapers, in which the workman, running 
through the dictionary for two words that 
sound alike, painfully erects a joke upon them. 
"Gentle Dulness ever loves a joke." 

187 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

The types of humour, then, are infinite in 
number; and the list which has been given has 
as its object to illustrate the scope of the prin- 
ciple that a sense of amusement is created 
whenever an incongruity is perceived, in which 
our sympathies are on the winning side. 

The incongruous is the irrational. The 
spirit of fun creates irrationality simply for 
pleasure. The spirit of comedy in general de- 
tects irrationality; it is essentially critical. 
Generally speaking, the humourist perceives a 
fault or abnormality and does not approve it. 
He may regard himself as a superior being 
looking down on a weakness which he does not 
share, or may be a companion, not lifted above 
his neighbour, but open-eyed to an imperfec- 
tion which, or the like of which, he may himself 
find in his own nature. Of the despiser of 
comic exceptions the savage is the simplest 
type. The savage has the contempt of igno- 
rance ; he is amused by everything new of which 
he is not afraid. The African savages of 
whom the psychologist Sully wrote went into 
paroxysms of laughter whenever they heard 
the click of a camera. The thing was not con- 
ventional, it "wasn't done" in African polite 
circles. And it was not terrible. 

188 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

The man of little training laughs like the 
savage, in ignorance. That which is new to him 
is comic. The styles of 1847, of 1890, of 1900, 
of 1916, are absurd in 1915. The styles of three 
months hence are absurd when they first ap- 
pear. Villagers laugh at foreigners. The in- 
habitants of the city of Washington, who see 
many kinds of costumes on foreign diplomats, 
accept them all. In most towns a turban or a 
fez or a horsehair hat with a sugarloaf crown 
and a flat brim would gather a mocking crowd. 

Not only ignorance but consciously superior 
intelligence may laugh in scorn. The prophet 
Isaiah ridicules the idolatrous carpenter who 
buys a log of wood, saws it in two, makes fire- 
wood of one end, and a god of the other. With 
one end he warms himself and saith, "Aha, I 
have seen the fire," and to the other he bows 
down. Milton is more ferociously scornful at 
the expense of the amateur acting of the young 
theological postulants, "writhing and unboning 
their clergy limbs to all the antic gestures of 
Trinculos, bawds, and buffoons." Swift, who 
had an extraordinary practical intelligence and 
an enthusiasm for social good, and who saw 
clearly the stupidity by which mankind is gov- 
erned, was tortured by it. How easy with a 

189 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

little good sense and a trifle of good will to 
create prosperity in Ireland, or to establish jus- 
tice in England; but how men insist on being 
fools, and such base fools! So he lashes the 
folly of the dirty race with his fearful scorn. 
"It is no loss of honour to be overcome by the 
lion, but who with the figure of a man would 
submit to be devoured alive by a rat!" 

Other humourists are cruel. Hate the 
thought as we may, we must recognize in unre- 
generate man a delight in triumphing over the 
pain of others; and in some writers there is a 
joy over the torture they imagine, as a cruel 
boy is gleeful over his wretched insect or un- 
lucky cat. Professor Woodberry attributes 
such cruelty to the humour of Poe. He regards 
him as gloating over Fortunato, or the man in 
The Pit and the Pendulum. 

The teacher's humour is from above down, 
like Addison, condescending to women, and in- 
structing them as "inferior beings, unworthy 
of the Latin grammar," about the rational 
conduct of life. Or like Pope, gently inform- 
ing the half-educated average man that 

' ' A little knowledge is a dangerous thing ; 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; " 

190 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

or putting the thoughtless majority in the 
proper frame of mind: 

" In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, 
One truth is clear: whatever is, is right." 

I suppose Pope and Addison are vexatious 
because they are so wholly sure of themselves, 
and so blandly benevolent to ordinary fools 
like us. As the tragedy of those writers who 
do not in their own natures intensely suffer the 
pains of man is an outward thing, a melodrama, 
so the humour of those who do not in their own 
natures take to themselves the follies of man 
is cold and external, a lesson and no joy. 

The humourist, then, may look from level 
ground at the incongruities which he perceives 
in men. That is, he may be well aware of the 
irrationality in that which amuses him, and at 
the same time he may be as well aware that 
he is himself as irrational, if not about this 
matter, then about something else. He is in 
judgment on the "winning" side, the rule, but 
in spirit he sympathizes with the exception. So 
arises a mixture of feelings, a mingling of 
amusement and tenderness, which disarms and 
loosens and penetrates the nature strangely. 
This is our sentiment about Don Quixote. He 

191 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

is below humanity, actually a monomaniac, an 
absurd monomaniac, ridiculous, contemptible if 
one could despise him. Yet lie is loved, not 
only by all the people in the book, but by all 
those who have read it since; by a kind of 
miracle he wins respect and almost worship as 
a saint. Cervantes would have been surprised 
and the Don would have uttered one of his 
richest addresses to Sancho Panza if he could 
have anticipated his posthumous glory as the 
incarnation of the unconquerable ideal. 

It is in these figures, at once ridiculous and 
beloved, that the novel, especially the older 
English novel, is particularly rich. Parson 
Adams, the Vicar of Wakefield, Matthew 
Bramble, Uncle Toby, Colonel Newcome, the 
Baron of Bradwardine and many more of 
Scott's characters, Mr. Pickwick and a cherubic 
host of Dickens's creation are personages who 
find their fit abiding place in the somewhat 
capricious world of the loosely ordered epic 
novel of the earlier English writers. The novel 
of tragedy, of analysis, or of mere romantic 
doing has no place for such characters. They 
require a spacious atmosphere, a wide-extended 
scene, clear sunlight, and healthy activity; not 
half lights, the microscope, the inner life, or 

192 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

the demands of the individual on the universe. 
Never at home in France, where the genial type 
of humour is one of sheer fun, like Tartarin, 
they do not exist in the novels of Eussia or 
Italy or Germany. Not even in Spain has the 
genial inspiration of the " hidalgo, old and 
poor," been felt as it has in England. 

The all-embracing humour, which is a serene 
philosophy in itself, is beyond the reach of most 
writers. With the growth of a stricter sense 
of cause and effect, of a severer idea of form, 
of a sadder if not a sterner philosophy, the 
beloved absurdities have disappeared from the 
novel. Only the geniuses most richly endowed 
with imaginative sympathy and with intel- 
lectual objectivity can attain to that large and 
free type. Most humourists are the servants of 
their rationality — they feel obliged to condemn 
and prefer ways of living, they take sides in 
sympathy against the objects of their ridicule. 
So Meredith, in his essay on Comedy and the 
Comic Spirit, conceives of comedy solely as 
criticism on human aberrations from sound 
reason, especially on those which result from 
the subtle infections of Self. He writes a novel 
as a satire on Egoism. His clear sense of his 
own point of view betrays him; he becomes a 

193 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

partisan, — a man touched with the absurdity 
of the superior person, — and the bells of folly 
jingle round his own unconscious head as he 
belabours with pedantic thoroughness the dusty 
jacket he has put upon his man of straw, Sir 
Willoughby Patterne. Like his is most of the 
humour of the later English novel — its purpose 
corrective satire, and its source the superior 
man's perception of the irrationalities of the 
society round him. Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. 
Wells have doctrines as to the social order and 
as to personal ethics, which they promulgate 
by the means of critical humour. One is 
blandly aloof, and remarks the absurdities of 
the conservative spirit with a pitying con- 
descension; the other with more insistence and 
scorn reveals the pettiness of big business and 
the hypocrisy of the conventional policing of 
life. Neither smiles in love. Thus the more 
recent English novel is less great than the 
elder, because it is more doctrinal and nar- 
rower in its humour. 

As the highest order of humour is manifested 
by an all-inclusive and sympathetic spirit, and 
a detachment from direct partisanship, so the 
highest order of pathos is manifested likewise. 
The noblest pity is aroused not by the dark 

194 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

mysteries of humanity, but by its profound 
pitiableness — a pitiableness found everywhere, 
in the virtuous and the sinful, in the prosperous 
as well as in the unfortunate. And men are 
thus moved with compassion not as superiors, 
but as sharers in the common lot, as on the 
same plane with all others. Moreover, this 
pity, so far as it is tainted with doctrinalism is 
weakened and made narrow — degenerates to 
sentimentality, evangelical, or Eussian Ortho- 
dox, or quietistic, or what not. It is when it 
is free, when quite objective, when it is a play 
of the nature, a temper, not a means of per- 
suasion, that it remains noble. Thus the spirit 
of humour, the spirit of pity, and the spirit of 
tragedy all reach their highest artistic power 
when applied in their utmost scope, when ap- 
plied to man, tragic in the disappointment of 
his highest aspiration, which is not therefore 
futile, pathetic in the weakness of his greatest 
strength, which is not therefore fruitless, 
ridiculous in the smallness of his grandest 
achievements, which are not therefore trivial. 

One of the chief functions of literature is to 
extend the limits of sympathy by reducing one 
field of life and nature after another to the 
service of the imagination. Here the novel has 

195 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

done the work of the pioneer. Beauty is found 
lurking where only ugliness was before per- 
ceived: in the ocean, the mountain, the desert; 
in the life-weary face and work-worn hand. 
Tragic sympathy has spread out from the 
demigod over all mankind; it takes in the 
frontiersman and the people of mean streets; 
it takes in even the bald citizen in broadcloth, 
and the labourer. Pity, which on Homer's 
page falls like a ray of Autumn sunshine on 
the captive, the child, the poor widow, the youth 
dying in his beauty, gives to us all a humble 
intelligence of every other heart, for — 

" He who feels contempt 
For any living thing, hath faculties 
Which he has never used." 

Above all, the novel has taught us to smile well 
and wisely. It has made the laugh of scorn 
and vanity itself absurd. It has even taken 
us past the comedy of the existing external 
order — 

1 ' Art made tongue-tied by authority, 

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill; — " 

to the temper, say, of Montaigne, who recog- 
nizes that healthy humanity is but a compound 

196 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

of sickly qualities, in approximate and unstable 
balance. The shining vanities and flaming 
ambitions of youth settling into contented (or 
discontented) baldness, and the measuring of 
tape, the humiliation that Goethe remarks upon, 
of being twice in love, — these are its objects. 
First is the comicality of the hunchback or the 
dwarf, then the ridiculousness of the clothed 
animal, then the lovable absurdity of the forked 
radish itself. 



197 



CHAPTER VI 

SETTING 

Two of the essential elements of a narrative, 
fable and character, have been discussed. 
There remains the third, the setting. The set- 
ting includes all the circumstances, material 
and immaterial, which surround the action and 
determine the conditions under which it takes 
place. Such are, for example, time and place, 
as in the fourteenth century, in Lapland; the 
social group or groups to which the personages 
belong, as commercial travellers, or cowboys, or 
the smart set, or backwoodsmen ; the current of 
ideas with which the narrative is conversant, 
as quietistic philosophy, or educational reform, 
or conservative politics; — in brief all that 
makes up the medium in which the action is 
carried on. Like the two elements of the nar- 
rative already discussed, the setting may be 
the writer's main interest. Thus in Waverley, 
it is not so much the adventures of Waverley 
in which Sir Walter Scott is interested as the 
contrast between Highland and Lowland life, 

198 



SETTING 

and the romantic spirit of a bygone age. And 
in Kim the real subject of the narrative is not 
the transaction — the growing np of Kim and 
his being trained into an efficient secret agent; 
or the characters — the Lama, the Babu, or the 
Mohammedan horse-seller; but the majestic 
panorama of North India, from the peaks of 
Tibet to the Punjab desert, and its multitude of 
human types, among which these leading per- 
sonages take their place. In Hugo's Notre 
Dame de Paris, Conrad's Typhoon, Poe's Fall 
of the House of Usher, and Stevenson's Merry 
Men, the chief motive of the tale is the spirit 
of place : the intensity of the tropics, the mys- 
tery of Gothic architecture, or the haunted 
aspect of a weed-grown garden or a desolate 
seashore. Even in those novels in which the 
setting is subordinate to plot and character, it 
is commonly of substantial importance in the 
narrative, and has an interest and power of its 
own. Imagine the novels of George Eliot, or 
Dickens, or Trollope, or Bennett, or Hardy 
without their setting. George Meredith alone 
of distinguished English novelists writes with- 
out a vivid sense of an abundant life about his 
characters. It makes a difference whether the 
scene of a story is in the parlour or the kitchen; 

199 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

in the road or on the lawn; in the Five Towns 
or at Fort Yuma. For the setting is not merely 
the matrix in which the characters are fixed; 
it is the soil in which they grow, the atmosphere 
which they breathe, the medium which sustains, 
envelops, nourishes, and controls them, and 
determines their manner of being. 

Of all aspects of the setting, the material sur- 
roundings, the "scene," is the simplest, the 
most pervasive, and perhaps the most impor- 
tant; and in the consideration of the scene, 
"nature" may well be treated first. Nature 
is a word of many meanings; but in this con- 
nection it plainly means the phenomena of the 
material universe excluding man, and man's 
direct handiwork. Pure nature, that is nature 
absolutely unaffected by human activity, is 
hardly to be seen on the face of the earth ; and 
if it were to be seen, it could hardly be the sub- 
ject of novels, which deal with men, and with 
men in society. There is ploughing, or there is 
smoke, or a fence, or there are at least foot- 
prints in every scene, even of an Arctic waste 
or an Alpine height. At sea, a novel is on ship- 
board, not in the welter of waves. So the 
nature which every man sees is never absolute 
wild nature in which he has no part. Yet, rela- 

200 



SETTING 

tively speaking, the human imprint may he 
stamped heavily or lightly on a scene; and in 
particular, objects in the country are in them- 
selves less directly shaped by the handiwork 
of man than those in towns. A field ploughed 
and harrowed and sown is modified by the 
activities of men; but it is not controlled by 
them. The contour of the ground expresses 
great secular forces above and outside of man 
and antedating his existence. The growth of 
plants, their form and colour, are the work of 
sun- warmth and rain-water, and the life within. 
The farmer labours as the obedient servant of 
nature, and plants in faith in her strength and 
her trustworthiness. Continuously, over and 
through the rural scene natural forces, that is, 
forces uncontrolled, undirected by men, — 
winds, clouds, light, life, — work the miracle of 
form and colour on the face of the earth. In 
this sense nature plays a great part in prose 
fiction. 

The way in which a writer feels about nature 
is manifested first of all by the way in which 
he relates his characters to the non-human 
phenomena of the universe. Nature in Robin- 
son Crusoe, for example, constitutes merely 
the materially conditioning facts surrounding 

201 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

Crusoe. The loneliness of the desert island 
makes life difficult for him; it does not touch 
his heart, or abash his spirit, or overwhelm 
his fortitude. The mountains breed goats, the 
sea-sands turtles, the forests pigeons ; they are 
all his meat. The cave makes a house for him, 
and the fertile ground is his seed-plot. This is 
all: there is no relation between Robinson 
Crusoe and the visible world except that it 
warms him, or chills him, or wets him with rain, 
or imprisons him on an island, clothes him with 
skins, feeds him with rice and goats' flesh, 
shelters him in a cave. It does not even arouse 
or irritate or excite him in any way. It does 
not even provide him with that necessity of 
mankind, amusement; his dog and his parrots 
entertain him. But they are almost parts of 
himself ; — humanized, not natural. 

Slightly more intimate than this self-regard- 
ing view of all things animate and inanimate 
is the spirit of what may be called the guide- 
book novel : the novel in which scene after scene 
is brought before the eyes as an object of curi- 
ous contemplation, as an object of intellectual, 
not of emotional interest. Such a novel is 
Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, in which the 
Bramble family and their train visit the notable 

202 



SETTING 

resorts of England, Scotland, and Wales and 
comment on them, each in his own character- 
istic fashion. There are later writers who less 
frankly and naively but quite as really divorce 
the life of the characters from the setting, who 
make "copy" of scenes, observing them curi- 
ously and interestedly, even with delicate ac- 
curacy, but coldly and aloof. Flaubert has 
something of this quality. The characters are 
studied with devoted thoroughness, and the 
scenes are studied with agonizing intensity; 
there is an intention to relate the one and the 
other; but each is set in place like a mosaic. 
The figures have hard outlines against a back- 
ground. 

But with many authors the relations between 
the characters and nature is a vital matter of 
the spirit; thus in the later eighteenth century 
sensitiveness to impressions of natural scenery 
is an indispensable mark of virtue. All the 
villains are indifferent to natural beauty of 
scene, and all the good people are easily moved 
by it, even to tears. When Lotte and Werther 
stand watching the approach of the storm, and 
are roused to a sense of might and majesty in 
nature, she lays a sympathetic hand on his, and 
with intense feeling utters the word symbolic 

203 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

to her of the loftiest moral sublimity; she 
breathes the name of the great author Klop- 
stock. So in Mrs. Badcliffe's Mysteries of 
Udolpho the heroine shudders appropriately at 
the entrance of every gloomy mountain pass, 
rejoices in the light of sunset glowing across 
the plains of Lombardy, or touching the roofs 
of Venice with a distant rosy tint, and weeps 
with a sentiment at once happy and melancholy 
in each evening twilight when the soft delicious 
breeze carries to her the fragrance of jasmine 
and the song of nightingales, the tender charm 
of the scene touching only the pure heart of 
Emily or Valancourt, and leaving the wicked 
and the frivolous, — Montoni and Madame 
Cheroni, — unmoved. 

Some authors, then, bring the feelings of 
their characters into subjection to the moods 
of nature; others create the opposite relation, 
and cause nature to reflect the feelings of the 
characters. For example, throughout Jane 
Eyre the weather is suited to the events. (It 
is frequently bad.) The account of Jane's op- 
pressed childhood begins on a chill, wintry day ; 
and she enters Lowood School on a "wet and 
somewhat misty afternoon,' ' with a "wild wind 
rushing amongst trees." The day before that 

204 



SETTING 

appointed for her wedding, a restless wind 
blows from the south, before which Jane Eyre 
runs with a certain pleasure, delivering her 
" trouble of mind to the measureless air tor- 
rent thundering through space. ' ' The first day 
of teaching in her retreat to Morton is one of 
autumnal peace: 

" The air was mild; the dew was balm! " 

And the day of Eochester 's second proposal has 
the sweetness of sunshine after rain. In 
Dickens, likewise, the whole of nature and even 
the inanimate creations of men's hands are 
alive with emotion. "Objects, with Dickens, 
take their hue from the thoughts of the char- 
acters. His imagination is so lively, that it car- 
ries everything with it in the path which it 
chooses. If the character is happy, the stones, 
flowers, and clouds must be happy too; if he 
is sad, nature must weep with him. Even 
to the ugly houses in the street, everything 
speaks." The facade of the Count's chateau, 
in A Tale of Two Cities, is as cold, smooth, 
and cruel as the Count's own face. Silas 
Wegg's stall was "the hardest little stall of all 
the sterile little stalls in London." The wind 
lives. It comes from the ends of the earth 

205 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

expressly to smite poor little Toby Veck; it 
whispers or roars terror in the ear of the mur- 
derer, Jonas Chuzzlewit; it whirls a wild and 
terrible disorder into the sky and fills the air 
with night when Rogue Riderhood plots to 
swear away the life of Gaffer Hexam. To the 
French critic, Taine, the imagination of Dick- 
ens seems analogous to the illusions of a 
monomaniac, so passionately and intensely is it 
exercised upon its objects. In truth Taine 
takes this attribution of a feeling soul to all the 
objects of nature too seriously. It is not a 
mania, but a fancy, utilized as a means of con- 
scious rhetorical effect, — not a symptom of the 
gloomy emotional intensity of the foggy 
islanders, who commit suicide in November. 

Again, with other writers, the setting, in- 
stead of being subject to the characters or to 
any other element of the novel, determines all 
the rest. So Stevenson writes : ' i The effect of 
night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of 
the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, 
calls up in the mind an army of anonymous 
desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, 
should happen ; we know not what, yet we pro- 
ceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest 
hours of life fleet by us in the vain attendance 

206 



SETTING 

on the genius of the place and moment. It is 
thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that 
reach into deep soundings, particularly torture 
and delight me. Something must have hap- 
pened in such places, and perhaps ages back, to 
members of my race; and when I was a child 
I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for 
them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them 
with the proper story. Some places speak dis- 
tinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a 
murder; certain old houses demand to be 
haunted; certain coasts are set apart for ship- 
wreck. ' ' 

Stevenson wrote not without a smile, and 
would have rejoiced with mischievous glee if 
taken quite literally; yet though he expresses 
not quite a faith, there is something more than 
playful fancy in his words. He believes that 
in some sense every man's spirit thrills to the 
vibrations of natural things; that the connec- 
tion between man and nature is obscure and 
inexplicable but very real, that it is active in 
the working of deeply seated instincts, and is 
manifested by the power of natural scenes over 
the imagination. Most novelists are less mystiG 
and more commonplace. With them nature is 
simply the background of a total picture, of 

207 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

which human beings fill the foreground, the 
whole being in such harmony as the imagina- 
tion and the artistic powers of the writer may 
create. With plain literalness, most novels 
recognize the obvious fact that men are in some 
measure determined by their natural surround- 
ings, — determined not only as to their physical 
life, but as to their spiritual and emotional life. 
So George Eliot's slow rustics are at home 
in the rich quiet of Hayslope, and Barrie's 
lean, long-headed, disputative peasants on the 
rougher hillsides about the village of Thrums. 
The whole tendency of modern thought, alike 
in art, science, and philosophy, has been to rec- 
ognize more and more this closeness of connec- 
tion between all living things and the surround- 
ing conditions of their life. Thus literature 
more and more recognizes individual men 
under particular conditions of place and time, 
and abandons faith in abstract humanity. In 
the novels of Thomas Hardy, the union of man 
and the nature about him is complete ; and the 
universe is thought of as one whole, man being 
the play of forces manifest in the nature about 
him, but beyond his comprehension. The 
Woodlanders, the dwellers upon Egdon, all the 
folk of Wessex are not separate from nature, 

208 



SETTING 

but are parts of it; they think and feel and 
speak as beings belonging to and created by 
their local circumstances. Yet even in Hardy's 
novels, the merging of man in nature is not 
complete. Not even in his pages is to be found 
that complete moral indifference which would 
result from the faith that the universe is one. 
In such a world there could be no good and no 
bad; and a novelist cannot afford to abandon 
the moral life, the great source of tragic and 
comic interest, the true mother of drama. 

Authors differ, in their feeling for nature, 
not only as to the relation existing between 
nature and their characters, but as to the kind 
of scene in which they themselves take par- 
ticular interest. There are people who value 
nature merely as a material convenience; who 
prize the earth purely as a place on which to 
grow corn or sheep, and value a scene solely 
for its promise of a return in wealth. Such a 
state of mind, natural in some circumstances 
and within limits entirely reasonable, is not 
altogether uncommon. I have heard farmers 
decry the ugliness of Michigan as compared 
with Illinois, because so much of Michigan con- 
sisted of lake and woodland, while in Illinois 
one could behold the delightful scene of unlim- 

209 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

ited cornfields, not broken by any such unrea- 
sonable interruptions to tillage as waste water 
and hills. The trees left standing in some Cali- 
fornia wheatfields are an annoyance to many 
eyes. The domestic and uncertain topography 
of the drift-covered parts of Wisconsin is to 
some beholders more beautiful than the bolder 
and more intelligible contours of the the un- 
glaciated region, carved in delicate but massive 
outlines by the slow, firm chisel of running 
water, and this because the confused heaps of 
glacial waste "look richer.' ' 

Humanly natural as the valuing of scenery 
because of its promise of wealth may be under 
some circumstances, the feeling is not likely to 
be strong in novelists. But of the contempla- 
tive delight in natural beauty, that which re- 
joices without the sense of ownership or the 
thought of wealth, there are many types. 
Nearest the crude delight in mere riches is the 
delight in a scene which promises human com- 
fort. Thus in the elder authors dealing with 
Spanish life it is a shady verdurous spot on the 
banks of a stream which is beautiful. The 
jailer in Gil Bias showed kindness to his pris- 
oner by placing him where he could look from 
his tower toward the groves by the river, and 

210 



SETTING 

not over the dry plain. Like Le Sage, Cervantes 
has the thought of a wayside encampment in 
every rapturous description of a scene. The 
heat and drought of Spain makes these charm- 
ing picnic spots beautiful, as the dusty gardens 
of Gulistan and the dry surface of Palestine 
are said to owe the praises bestowed upon them 
in poetry to the contrast between them and the 
desert. 

But the really aesthetic delight in scenery is 
a disinterested feeling, and depends on instincts 
less tangible and more profound than delight 
in the promise of human wealth or even of 
human comfort. It has its source deep below 
consciousness, in an instinctive imaginative 
sympathy with those tendencies of the nature 
about us with which we find our own ideals, 
the tendencies of our own natures, to be in har- 
mony. Most men's tastes about everything are 
consistent, are i i all of a piece. ' ' A man demand- 
ing a strong excitation of contrast in colour, 
will be likely to delight in violent contrasts of 
sound and smell and action. He will delight 
in a glaring picture, a clashing symphony, 
a screaming farce, high-flavoured meats, a vio- 
lent melodrama, a "vigorous foreign policy,' ' 
and a vivid life, a life abundant in action rather 

211 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

than controlled by a system and directed to a 
purpose. A man who loves unity and order in 
one part of his nature is likely to love it in all 
things: he prizes "composition" — systematic 
beauty of pattern — in pictures, symmetry in 
architecture, a clean-cut plot and schematic 
types of character in the drama, a marked and 
distinct evolution in a piece of music, a regulat- 
ing government with a fixed policy, a precise if 
bounded ideal of life, contributing to efficiency 
in action. His friend who delights in the indi- 
vidual thing will like it everywhere : he will de- 
mand in a painting not so much a scheme as a 
vivid, a unique impression, not the generalized 
light of the studio but the light of two o'clock 
in the afternoon, in early December, by a New 
England brook beset with birches, each tree 
with its own character. He will ask not so 
much for a pattern as for a particular mood in 
his music. He will demand of a writer, as 
Flaubert demanded of de Maupassant, that in 
describing a row of cab-horses, all looking alike, 
all skin and bones, he shall make the reader 
perceive the characteristic which makes any of 
the wretched hacks differ from every other one, 
from the fifty before and the fifty after. He will 
ask for character not typical but unique; he 

212 



SETTING 

will demand variety and the exception; in the 
plot he will think less of the clearness of the 
whole than of the power which art has of fixing 
the evanescent charm of fleeting incident; and 
in morals he will insist more on abundant 
variety of experience than on a nnity which 
cannot but limit nature. 

So the tastes of a writer as to scenery may 
be an index of those deepest elements of his 
character, those preferences which guide intel- 
lectual decisions and irretrievably bias conduct. 
They may be ; for it is not safe to accept them 
implicitly. Taste is often conventional, the 
preferences of one period being not those in 
fashion at another. No doubt many a man en- 
joys at second-hand, not questioning his own 
feelings, but accepting that which it is the 
thing to take delight in. There are plenty of 
college girls who write glib essays on Pope's 
lack of feeling for nature and on Words- 
worth's insight into the deeper meaning of 
natural things, but who know no flowers or 
stars or birds, who cannot walk ten miles, and 
who find in the magnificence of storm and wind 
and rain only an occasion for grumbling. 
Again, the feeling for nature may be compen- 
satory, so that the man of compelled orderly 

213 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

conduct finds a relief in reading of wildness, 
and thus discharges his mind of a perilous re- 
belliousness against circumstance; as Cooper 
used to be a favourite in quiet, regulated Ger- 
many. Sometimes, also, the feeling for nature, 
like taste in any other field, is subordinated to 
other interests; as preoccupation with charac- 
ter may be an enemy to plot, and the two may 
not both be real indices to the preferences of 
the author. Yet after all, if due allowance is 
made for all these considerations, an author's 
preferences for special types of scene may at 
least be used to corroborate or to illustrate the 
impressions of his intellectual and moral char- 
acter derived from other sources. It is no ac- 
cident that Gray and Collins delight in twilight 
and dusk; that Wordsworth's greatest power 
is manifested in the impression of vast con- 
trolled force, — of the spacious sea, the stars, 
steadfast in their courses, the everlasting 
mountains; or that Byron finds the Mediter- 
ranean scene, rich in contrast, with an energy 
heightened beyond that of the equable North, 
the natural setting for his works, while his 
mountains, unlike Wordsworth's, delight him 
most when companioned by thunder or hurling 
down avalanches. 

214 



SETTING 

The novelists, like the poets, with this key 
unlock their hearts. Fielding is pleased by the 
gentle and proportioned beauty of an undulat- 
ing landscape, softly touched by the hand of 
man, — a lovely English park. Smollett re- 
joices in the picturesque variety of the High- 
land landscape of lake and mountain, with 
crags and spiry firs, in place of soft hills and 
spreading lowland trees. Mrs. Kadcliffe is 
pleased with indistinctly outlined scenes, hav- 
ing uncertain lights and shadows, at twilight 
or under the light of the moon, suggesting mys- 
tery; or else she revels in rugged scenes of 
violent contrast, — dark ravines, fir-covered 
slopes, and a gloomy castle in the setting sun, 
all again full of mystery, the mystery of dark 
foreboding. Sir Walter Scott's scenes are 
bolder, firmer, harder of outline, more vigorous 
in construction, and more sharp in contrast, 
alike in colour and form; they are fitly con- 
ceived as the setting for the actions of his 
interesting characters, such as Eichard or 
Fergus, vivid and active, strong in their con- 
trasts, and bold in their outlines. 

Among recent novelists, the power of seeing 
and presenting scenery on the great scale and 
with the sublimity of vastness is a notable gift 

215 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

of Mr. Budyard Kipling. His scenes have not 
intimacy or delicacy; but they have sweeping 
immensity and extraordinary truth of relation- 
ship. The view across the valley from Purun 
Bhagat's shrine, whence " Purun Bhagat saw 
an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but 
the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half- 
way over," the sea: 

' ' The sight of salt water unbounded, ' ' 

the vast Indian plain ; — these sights, if they do 
not delight him more than the gentle and cir- 
cumscribed landscape of south England, are 
at least presented by him with peculiar power. 
Even in England he rejoices in the wind-swept 
down, and in the road which mysteriously 
binds region with region, and is haunted by the 
sense of an immense past. 

There is no aspect of nature in which Mr. 
Thomas Hardy does not rejoice. He writes of 
nature, as Miss Annie Macdonell points out, not 
only with a countryman's knowledge and an 
artist's perception, but with a worshipper's 
devotion, with a sentiment at once warm, 
tender, and rapturous. He looks gently on the 
toad, humbly labouring across the path; he 
hears with pleasure the very papery scraping 

216 



SETTING 

of dry grass-blades on the hillside; he has an 
eye for the odd motions of little birds, and for 
the tender colours of mists, and for the gray 
bareness of sky and the drab bareness of dusty 
earth staring at each other. He delights in the 
winy richness of Autumn, and in the austerity 
of " haggard Egdon," the heath out of whose 
countenance " solitude seemed to look." He 
rejoices in nature's power and in nature's ten- 
derness, and draws even from her cruelty a 
grave, fortifying strength. 

The second division of the scene, the ma- 
terial setting, of a work of fiction, is the 
handiwork of man. It is easy to see that in 
this class of objects there is a gradation from 
things which are definitely a mere part of the 
setting to things which are really a part 
of the characters. The clothes habitually 
worn are part of the man himself; witness the 
embarrassment of our dreams when we are 
caught without them. Unclad, we are not social 
beings; we have not our regular functions, 
and we are not in command of our acts. Less 
frequently worn clothes are still parts of our 
actual living selves as we think of ourselves; 
but they are less intimately so than are our 
ordinary clothes. A man on the occasional 

217 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

regalia of his lodge, a professor in evening 
dress which he wears twice a year, a clerk in 
overalls out fishing is a modified person, a per- 
son whose relation to society is dislocated. 

Even the habitual surroundings may be 
thought of as a part of a character quite as well 
as of the setting. Podsnap is not only his 
voice and his language, but his hideously solid 
plate; Veneering 's new and slightly sticky var- 
nished furniture is a part of that impression 
which makes up what we call the man, and 
what he is to himself; Venus is not complete 
without his shop, " musty, leathery, feathery, 
gluey" of smell, "and as it might be, strong of 
old pairs of bellows" ; and Rogue Riderhood and 
Gaffer Hexam take into themselves something 
of the mouldering river shore, — "discoloured 
copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, green 
dank deposit." A sailor on shipboard is him- 
self as he is not in a hotel dining-room; and 
his ship is to his inner consciousness a part of 
himself; it is a part of his imagination of his 
own character in activity. A preacher is 
clothed with his pulpit as he is with his black 
frock coat. A bedroom is a speech proclaiming 
the person who occupies it. How exquisite the 
picture in Faust of Margaret's room, bare, 

218 



SETTING 

very poor, but breathed through by fresh and 
fragrant air, its white sanded floor and neatly 
folded linen bearing witness to her virginal 
purity and to her womanly sense of order. 

But even these intimate parts of the human 
aspects of the setting are commonly thought of 
as separate from the characters, as detachable 
circumstance, as not the breath or speech of 
the personages but as their atmosphere and 
condition; and the more remote objects are of 
course always looked at thus. Now, in the 
progress of the novel from the typical and gen- 
eral toward the separate and unique, more and 
more attention is paid to the fulness of the set- 
ting, especially in its human aspects. Not 
alone the quality of natural scenes, — the peep 
of day, and the song of birds, the gleam of 
rivers, and the odours of Autumn, but Sixth 
Avenue, and the steamer San Andreas, and 
the H. and R. office, and Mr. Hardanger's new 
house are particularized with precision and 
suggestive force not alone by men with special 
talents like Dickens and Balzac, but by every- 
body. 

Midway between nature and the ordinary 
handiwork of man is architecture. A building, 
still more the mass of a city's buildings, bulks 

219 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

large, encloses the view, is a permanent object, 
bears the mark of time, in brief, makes a 
weighty and fixed impression, like that of the 
great objects of nature. New buildings are 
significant of the character of the community 
which erects or tolerates them. In America, 
the convention of the simplified Italian renais- r , 
sance which we call Colonial, and which held 
its own to the middle of the nineteenth century, 
has a sparse dignity. The vicissitudes of taste 
manifested on college campuses since that day 
at least make plain the absence of any clear 
standard or purpose, and of any intelligent 
criticism. The brutal ugliness of the raw wall 
on the side of a business block tells a story, 
and the irregularities and incongruities in the 
fagades of a row of business blocks likewise tell 
the tale of self-assertion and indifference to 
dignity and harmony in the public expression 
of a corporate life. 

Old buildings, marked by time, combine hu- 
man associations with the mystery and power 
of nature. An ancient building, Ely cathedral, 
the palace of Cnossus, the theatre at Taormina 
— an ancient building which has echoed to the 
verses of Euripides, the sentences of Minos, 
the death-scream of forgotten children, or the 

220 



SETTING 

prayer and the hymn in Latin and in Eng- 
lish of the last abbot; which has been trod by 
the feet of generations, swift in joy or dnty, 
slow in compulsion, shuffling or dragged in 
defeat; which has been splashed with the blood 
of rapine or retribution, and is now unroofed 
and washed in rain or dew, or more solemn 
still, is still serving for prayer or justice or 
domestic living; — who can look at it without 
giving it a soul, a human sympathy with the 
long generations which have passed through it 
in continuous stream, flowing on to that mist- 
eevered sea the sound of which rolls for ever 
along the shores of life? At the same time 
ancient buildings touch us with power like that 
of the hills : they are marked and formed and 
coloured by natural forces; their carving has 
lost its fresh, crisp outlines, but gained a more 
appealing strangeness; ivy grows out of their 
walls; their columns are prostrate; they grow 
greater as we recede from them, like a tall tree 
or a mountain on the horizon. 

It is this peculiar thrill of architecture, and 
not the charm of external nature, which cap- 
tivated the imagination of the first writers to 
make much of the emotional power of setting. 
The one sincere element in Walpole 's Castle of 

221 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

Otranto was Walpole's sensitiveness to the 
impressions of Gothic architecture in ruin, with 
its suggestions of romantic mystery. So a 
more ample and a profounder feeling for the 
same kind of effect is the essential poetic 
quality of Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of 
Udolpho. In Victor Hugo's gigantic romance 
of Notre Dame, the ancient cathedral, fantastic, 
horrible, beautiful, possessing an energetic but 
agonizing life, is the hero of the tale. 

In all cases where the setting has weight and 
significance it is the spirit of the scene, as we 
say, that has been interpreted; that is, it is the 
emotional complex evoked in the author which 
has been genuinely communicated. It is not 
the scene, in fact, but a way of feeling about the 
scene; not Hayslope, but George Eliot's memo- 
ries of her childhood, when her father drove 
about in a gig with her between his knees, a 
child of six ; not England in the days of Richard 
the Lion-Hearted, but Sir Walter's imagina- 
tion of a rude but noble era, with its crowded 
hours of glorious life; not Egdon Heath, but 
Thomas Hardy's vision of a sinister power 
within the natural world, brooding without ruth 
upon the "purblind race of mortal men," the 
pitiful victims of life. 

222 



SETTING 

If even the material aspect of the setting is 
really a thing of the spirit, so much the more 
plain is the importance of its immaterial 
aspect, of the medium in which the characters 
live ; the body of sentiments, ideas, customs, as- 
sumptions, faiths ; the civilization or culture of 
which the characters are a part; the " milieu" 
of the story. 

The historical novel sets out with the object 
of expressing a milieu, a complete social order, 
as a tangible imagined whole. It is true that 
there are many types of historical novel, but 
all at least ostensibly promise to take the. 
reader back into a bygone but actual world, 
with its political organization, its religious 
faiths and customs, its ways of earning a liv- 
ing, its manners, its speech, its dress, its 
thoughts. It is the setting which in an his- 
torical novel is the motive force, the charac- 
teristic source of interest, the " marvellous' ' 
which combined with the " probable' ' of plot 
and character creates the piquancy of the story. 
The object of the historical novel is to create 
the illusion of life in a bygone age, under cir- 
cumstances once existing, now vanished. If 
the narrative does not do that, does not make 
the reader feel that he is reading a tale of other 

223 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

times, the book, whatever its merits, fails as 
an historical novel. It follows that the setting 
of the historical novel must be very full and 
ample. The face of things was strangely dif- 
ferent in the past from what it is now. The 
skies, the winds, the main contours of the hills 
remain, it is true, unchanged; but everything 
else is unlike what it was. The rivers flow 
somewhat as they used, but within straight- 
ened banks. There was a forest over that hill- 
side, where now the cattle are at pasture. 
Where there is now a willow-bordered lane run- 
ning beside the lake, there was first a track 
along which the Indians moved out to the hunt- 
ing in summer and back again in winter to 
their village, then a deep-rutted cartway, and 
then a paved road down which a stage-coach 
jingled. At last it is a forgotten bytrack, made 
useless by the railroad on the other side of the 
hill. Where the plough today turns up bits of 
potsherd from the soil in the meadow, there 
were smooth stone-built houses along narrow 
streets ; and within the mound moulder the rem- 
nants of the ancient city wall, once built high 
and square, strong with magic strength until 
the day when the bar of the gate was broken, 
and fire with shrieking ran through the houses 

224 



SETTING 

behind the wall. Not alone have outward 
things changed, but all the conditions of life 
were almost inconceivably unlike those of 
today. All men were attached to the soil; — 
not alone the serfs and the slaves, but even in 
a degree the wealthiest and the most noble. 
This was the case because the fruits of the 
earth had in general to be consumed near where 
they were reaped. Trade dealt with precious 
things carried in small parcels, not with gross 
raw materials filling enormous cars and mon- 
strous steam vessels. Accepted ideas of all 
kinds were different : about taking interest and 
the rotation of crops, and the objects of gov- 
ernment ; about religion and women ; about the 
very foundations of right and wrong. The 
writer of an historical novel, then, has to con- 
jure up before his reader's eyes all this. He 
must describe an unknown land; he must rep- 
resent the look of an old market-place, enter the 
atrium or the cathedral, costume the people in 
the garments of their day, and make them 
speak typical thoughts in a language typical of 
the era in which they lived. Most arduous of 
all, he must conceive of them as each a member 
of a definite social group, dressed and thinking 
and speaking not only as a personage of a defi- 

225 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

nite age and country but as a member of a class 
within that age and country; — a Varangian at 
Constantinople in the eleventh century, a Saxon 
thrall in 1189, a Hansa merchant in Liibeck in 
1382, a Scotch archer at the court of Louis XI 
of France. 

Moreover, this ample detail should be, and 
in the writings of the greatest historical 
novelists is, drawn from the repository of a 
full mind. The true historical novelist has not 
merely the laboriously acquired but unemo- 
tionalized and extraneous knowledge of the 
student; he has long let his imagination feed 
on the past. Thus only are gained unity and 
ease and energy. So Scott, long before he 
thought of writing an historical novel, had 
measured the ruins and battlefields of south- 
ern Scotland and northern England, and was 
so full of knowledge of Border history that he 
could pour forth an unceasing stream of lively 
or terrifying traditional narrative about the 
region of his loving knowledge. Likewise 
Thackeray in writing of the eighteenth century 
was dealing with an age in which he had de- 
lighted to lose himself. He had formed his 
style on the writings of its greater authors, and 
filled his mind with an abundance of detail from 

226 



SETTING 

its minor periodical essays. George Eliot, on 
the contrary, in writing of Florence in the 
time of Savonarola, laboriously and minutely 
studied the era, of set purpose resolving to 
acquire the " idiom' ' of bygone life. She was 
determined by force of will and knowledge to 
use old Florence to express ideas already in 
her mind. She read ' i a hundred books ' ' about 
it; the work " ploughed into" her; it " found 
her a young woman and left her an old 
woman." The result, though brilliant and 
beautiful, lacks the ease and richness of the 
writers who followed the course of going for 
material to what they already knew. 

The completeness with which the idea, the 
inner life, of the work has taken possession of 
the writer determines what may be called the 
theme of the book — the scheme of thought or 
way of approach by which all this abundant 
life of the imagination is made manageable. In 
general, it is as an imaginary world that the 
historical novelist thinks of the past, not as an 
historical one. He may believe that he is 
simply presenting his idea of a bygone age; 
but in reality he is taking refuge from the 
monotony or commonplaceness of the present 
in an imagined past. In that far-off time, 

227 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

more entertaining things could happen than in 
the present day; more adventure, more thrill- 
ing escapes, bolder speeches, more decisive 
acts. Even a ghost or a fairy might then have 
been possible ; or at least strange powers might 
have been at work in the actual world. Thus 
the historical novel in general is but 

" young-ey'd Poesy 
All deftly mask'd as hoar Antiquity." 

This romantic quality is not transcendent, it 
does not reach the frank marvel of the fairy 
tale, or the superhuman strangeness of the 
epic, but it colours the story, which at the same 
time is told with a fulness of detail and an 
amplitude of characterization such as to make 
the whole produce the illusion of a record of 
fact. 

The vision of the past in which the historical 
novel has its origin varies from author to 
author in its main elements; and the worth of 
the book varies with the worth of the vision. 
Each writer, in other words, has a point of 
view, develops a theme, writes round a central 
substance, determined for him by the nature of 
his vision. To Alexandre Dumas the elder, the 
movements of history depend upon the success 

228 



SETTING 

or failure of ingenious schemes devised by 
clever intriguers, and " pulled off" with theat- 
rical brilliance, as if on a stage set for them. 
The question is, shall Eichelieu or the Three 
play the successful trick? Shall the Queen have 
back her diamonds in time, or shall she be pub- 
licly shamed? Shall the love-affair of the King 
and Louise prosper? These are interesting, 
even exciting questions, but they are not great ; 
they are not in the proper sense historical. For 
Charles Reade, the fundamental theme, the 
creating element in his vision of the social 
order is the living condition of great groups 
of men, determined by large general influences. 
Such are the state of war, national character- 
istics, and especially fundamental conceptions 
as to morals. Primary among these moral 
questions is the contest between the family 
ideal and the monastic ideal (the Cloister and 
the Hearth) ; but in addition to his leading 
topic he considers a multitude more of influ- 
ences which affect both the outer customs of 
an age and its inner and spiritual habits of 
thought. In Thackeray, the special historical 
matter is little more than a setting for a 
domestic tale, and the course of public events 
serves only to celebrate the superior beauty of 

229 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

peaceful love and unassuming renunciation. 
"History," public history, is to him only a 
record of mean ambitions and unworthy suc- 
cesses; of a Marlborough, avaricious and de- 
ceitful, victorious over the honest General 
Webb, of a corrupt Walpole on the one hand 
and a frivolous and shallow James Edward on 
the other. The past, in his view, is per- 
manently interesting because of the men who 
wrote books, Swift and Addison and Steele, 
and because a noble and gentle life could once 
be led by renouncing pomp and glory and 
the vanities of this wicked world, as the 
Marquis of Esmond renouncing his title with- 
drew to the wilds of Virginia from the cor- 
ruption of the English court and of English 
politics. 

To the contemplation of Sir Walter Scott, 
the social order is a picturesque pageant, in 
which human beings are grouped in bodies, 
each distinguished by strongly marked pecu- 
liarities. Such bodies are Jews, peasants, re- 
ligious sectaries of the most extreme types, 
queens, old soldiers, country lawyers. At the 
same time this assembly of picturesquely dis- 
tinguished groups is not a mere confusion, but 
a great though complicated panorama. One 

230 



SETTING 

group plays upon and is related to another; 
people buy and sell, rule and are governed, and 
recognize the place and rightness of order and 
difference and relation. Above all, two great 
groups manifesting contrary tendencies are 
generally set in opposition and contend with 
each other, the result of their contest determin- 
ing the fate of the principal characters. In- 
deed, Scott 's titular hero is generally so placed 
that both the great contestants appeal to his 
sympathy" and exert an influence upon his mind.' 
Thus the theme of Ivanhoe is the contrast 
between Norman and Saxon, typified in salient 
figures like Cedric and Brian, the two ideals 
being reconciled in the person of Ivanhoe. The 
theme of Waverley is the conflict between the 
picturesque Highland nature, with its romantic 
loyalty to the Stuarts, and the steadier Eng- 
lish nature, with its sober support of the 
House of Hanover. Waverley is played upon 
by all elements; indeed, he is a victim of his 
impressibility. 

Among these visions of the past, some are 
more completely and deeply true than others. 
It is not humanly true that the really signifi- 
cant events of history are determined by petty 
machinations for personal ends; they are de- 

231 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

termined by forces affecting great multitudes 
of men. Scott's vision of the social order, 
therefore, is sounder and more beautiful than 
Dumas 's. It corresponds more truly with the 
complexity of human life than Charles Beade's. 
It recognizes the worth of the active vir- 
tues as well as the passive ones, and hence 
is truer than Thackeray's. It is a better, 
a more complete, just, and healthy vision 
of society than that of any of these other 
authors. 

Early in this book it was remarked that the 
source of unity is force and completeness of 
imagination. One aspect of the unity thus 
arising is that in that in vividly conceived his- 
torical fiction the narrative of historical forces 
and the personal plot are one. The opposite 
weakness is very frequent. How many novels 
there are in which a series of personal adven- 
tures has been invented separately from the 
historical setting, which is then brought into 
contact with it, — is dragged in by the ears, and 
then bolts off the stage, until it is whistled back 
again. So General Washington comes into 
Janice Meredith's love story because the author 
willed to have it so. So in The Heart of Mid- 
lothian the Porteous riots are forced into eon- 

232 



SETTING 

nection with the story, not uningeniously, but 
not from any imaginative prevision. On the 
other hand, in Waverley the fate of nations and 
the fate of the hero are conceived by the same 
strong single act of creative power. As 
Bagehot put it, when he wished to insist on the 
breadth and unity of Scott's vision: " If Scott 
had given us the English side of the race to 
Derby, he would have described the Bank of 
England paying in sixpences and also the loves 
of the cashier." A result of this imaginative 
oneness is that in the best historical novels per- 
sonages who are in the foreground of history 
are seldom in the foreground of the novel. 
The greatest poems dealing with history are 
not about the greatest events, but about strik- 
ing minor incidents. It is not Trafalgar or 
"Waterloo, Nelson or Wellington, that have 
inspired famous poems, but the burial of Sir 
John Moore, or the sight of Calais across the 
Channel, or the loss of the Royal George. Still 
less are the Eeform Bills of 1832 or 1867 cele- 
brated in noble verse. The reason is that the 
actuality of great events and the real charac- 
ters of well-known personages chain down the 
freedom of the imagination; that they prevent 
the reworking of 

233 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

" Unconcerning things, matters of fact, 
What Caesar did, yea, and what Cicero said," 

into the "more philosophical" reality of the 
imagination, the thing permanently because 
hnmanly true. A great historical personage 
acting as a force in the story and seen through 
the eyes of a humble adherent does not pro- 
voke question. Perhaps Mary Queen of Scots 
was not thus, but thus she might have seemed 
to Eichard Avenel. But Gr. P. R. James's 
Eichelieu and Lytton's Warwick challenge our 
faith too definitely. So does Mr. Maurice 
Hewlett's Richard Yea-and-Nay. He is a won- 
derful figure, vivid and brilliant, but he is not 
credible. Being not merely a force, not merely 
a sketch in the background, but a hero, who in- 
sists upon being psychologically weighed and 
considered, he shocks the reader's imagination 
as an impossible king and inconceivable leader. 
The taking of sides about matters of history, 
so that as between the great forces that divided 
men in the past, an author presents only one 
side sympathetically — this partisanship dimin- 
ishes imaginative power, and prevents the 
writer from effectively presenting even the 
defects of that to which he is opposed. This 
is no uncommon fault, for the controversies of 

234 



SETTING 

the past live on in those of the present; and 
even when they do not actually continue, they 
provoke the same differences of temperament as 
in their own time. The cavaliers of today still 
love Mary Queen of Scots. Mr. Hilaire Belloc 
and Thomas Carlyle would write very differ- 
ently about ship-money or Frederick the Great. 
The Mexican War still complicates the foreign 
policy of the United States. A German and a 
Pole will hardly express themselves alike 
about the Teutonic Order, or a Norseman and 
a Frenchman about the Eoman Empire, or a 
New Yorker and a Canadian about the Eoyal- 
ists of the American Eevolution. Yet nothing 
is more plain than that a cause which moved 
whole generations of men to the depths of their 
lives must have had some good ground for 
being, something noble, something capable of 
being considered holy. A man may on the 
whole oppose and condemn a cause in com- 
parison with its opposite; but unless he can 
see both sides as they appealed to the imagina- 
tions of their adherents, he cannot interpret 
them to later ages. Thus Cardinal Newman in 
his novel Callista makes the paganism of the 
Eoman decadence wholly evil, wholly grotesque, 
and powerful only with the power of Satan. 

235 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

His book is an answer to Charles Kingsley's 
Hypatia, in which a certain beauty and power 
are attributed to heathen philosophy, in opposi- 
tion to the evil qualities conceived by Kingsley 
to exist in sacerdotalism and monachism. Both 
have written one-sided books, but Kingsley's 
is imaginatively more one, and is more beau- 
tiful because both the contending elements are 
treated with a measure of sympathy, and not 
in hate and contempt. There are multitudes 
of these biased books; books which colour his- 
tory to suit denominational spirit, or local 
patriotism. There are Church of England 
novels, Eoman Catholic novels, novels of 
American or Polish bias. It is seldom that 
the authors have been able to rise above their 
partisanship into the clear air of imaginative 
detachment. 

In its view of human character, the historical 
novel tends, of course, to present persons as 
types ; to seek for the generic, and the qualities 
which group human beings into classes, not to 
consider those things which mark them as spe- 
cial and unique. The reason is obvious: the 
setting itself being strange, the classes them- 
selves having the piquancy of uncommonness, 
there is no interest in seeking the strange 

236 



SETTING 

within the strange. The historical effect would 
disappear if the personages stood only for 
themselves and not for their age and social 
group. Scott, indeed, represents his charac- 
ters as extreme in their class. Isaac is a Jew 
of Jews; Bailie Jarvie is a Bailie of Bailies. 
Thackeray, on the other hand, represents per- 
sons tinged but not deeply coloured by the 
peculiarities of their age and class. He is, even 
in his historical novels, more human than his- 
torical. 

When Coleridge created the Ancient Mariner, 
he gained credence for the wonders of the tale 
by remoteness and unfamiliarity of place as 
well as by distance in time : 

" We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 

Historical novels do a similar thing. Their 
country is a strange but definite region as their 
era is a strange but definite age. The local 
quality of Scott's novels, for instance, his rep- 
resentation of Scotch " tangent groups," of 
human islands of queerness, is the most pithy 
and powerful aspect of his writing. Belated 
to the historical novel, then, is the novel of 

237 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

separated localities, of provincial character- 
istics, of the picturesqueness or oddity or ro- 
mance of the regions ont of the current of 
ordinary life. The world is now ransacked for 
the out-of-the-way, the side-tracked, the ar- 
rested species of humanity. Thus in Germany 
there is a large body of fiction concerned 
with local types, especially of peasants, 
who because of their immobility have a pe- 
culiarly strong singularity. There are novels of 
the Black Forest, of Mecklenburg, of Galicia. 
In England, Charlotte Bronte 's novels are all of 
the North, Dickens 's of the towns of southeast- 
ern England, and especially of lower-class 
London; Mr. Hardy, of course, confines him- 
self to his own Kingdom of Wessex. In 
America, novels are inevitably local, if they are 
not merely panoramic; — novels of New Eng- 
land, indeed of Cape Cod or the Berkshire 
hills; novels of the San Francisco peninsula; 
of the Nebraska sandhills. 

Just as historical novels are commonly 
romantic, so in the main local novels are pic- 
turesque or eccentric; in either case they aim 
at a certain heightening of life, at an escape 
from the commonplace. Miss Edgeworth's 
tales of the Irish squires and the successive 

238 



SETTING 

generations of Irish retainers, Morier's Per- 
sian picaresque novel of Hajji Baba, Kipling's 
stories of India, Bret Harte's mining camp 
narratives, and Miss Murfree's novels of the 
Great Smoky Mountains all afford examples of 
an intentional oddity or grotesqueness, and 
sometimes of a romantic directness of passion 
or brilliance of colouring. The special source 
of interest in all these tales of place is the 
strangeness of the setting, as in the historical 
novel. Hence in the one as in the other an 
ample presentation of the setting is necessary. 
Creole New Orleans as Mr. G. W. Cable saw 
it, the Eussian village in Turgenev's stories is 
as palpable before the reader as any place in 
de Vigny's old France, or Jokai's old Hun- 
gary, or Sienkiewicz 's ancient Poland. More- 
over, there are living readers to challenge the 
accuracy of the local novelist; and indeed the 
writer who " makes copy" of any region may 
expect to raise up bitter enemies by the process. 
Every jest, every touch of satire, every faint 
shadow will be resented; even the detachment 
of sympathy requisite to see the social order as 
an artist sees it will excite some lover to wrath. 
Hence, it behooves the novelist of a place to be 
even more sedulous than the novelist of a time 

239 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

as to the imaginative security and power of 
the setting in his narratives. Again, the his- 
torical and the local novel are alike in another 
matter. The imagination is tested by the unity 
of setting and character; the characters are of 
their place as in the historical novel they are 
of their time. Thus Bret Harte's California 
and his people are one in his earlier stories, but 
separate in his later ones, and Mr. Kipling's 
New England shows manifest traces of being 
used for copy, while his Indian tales grow 
naturally out of life. 

The method used most frequently by the 
novelists who concern themselves with the ef- 
fect of locality is that of Scott; that is, the 
representation of odd separated groups by the 
extreme types characteristic of their ruling 
tendencies. Such novelists delight in the 
stiffest elder of the flotsam of Covenanters 
stranded in North Vermont, or the most im- 
periously frank of untaught mountain girls in 
a Tennessee "Cove," or the roughest good 
heart of Lone Dog Camp, or the fieriest and 
most wasteful of Irish squires, with something 
generous in his broken old body. Naturally, 
the local novel abounds in a bold humour, a 
humour of exaggeration and vigorous incon- 

240 



SETTING 

gruity. The contrast between ordinary condi- 
tions and those of the remote region presented 
is always in the mind, even when it is not 
explicitly emphasized upon the pages of the 
book; and snch a contrast is in itself almost 
inevitably humorous. There is obvious comedy 
in the sophisticated man imported into the 
naive region, or in the naive man brought into 
a sophisticated civilization: Colonel Carter of 
Cartersville in New York or any tenderfoot in 
Pioche or Wolfville. Then there are comic 
incongruities within the excessive natures of 
the main characters themselves. The exag- 
gerations and unreasonableness, the grotesque 
vices and the odd nobilities of an Old Thady, 
the timorousness and courage, the adipose and 
agility, the scepticism and credulity of Hurree 
Baboo, are examples of the incongruities of 
character to which the fiction of locality tends 
by its nature. 

Common to the local and the historical novel 
is the use of dialect. Dialect is merely one of 
the elements of the immaterial setting; in itself 
it has no interest except to a scientist. There 
is no reason why a character should use a 
peculiar or limited language except as that lan- 
guage symbolizes or makes possible the repre- 

241 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

sentation of a way of thought or colours a way 
of life. The problem of the creation of a dia- 
lect in a novel is a difficult one. Even a slight 
strangeness of aspect in the words of an author 
is an obstacle to most readers. Even the very 
modest demands of Sir Walter Scott's Scotch 
dialect annoy or repel many. Hence the first 
virtue of a dialect is not to be accurate but to 
be expressive. The object of employing the 
language of the cowboy, the Norse immigrant, 
or the Pennsylvania Dutchman is primarily to 
create an imaginative illusion, not to offer 
instruction in phonetics. So long as the reader 
is compelled to labour upon details in order to 
create within himself the imaginative unity of 
the story he cannot lose himself in the vision. 
Hence a touch, a hint, a tinge of dialectic 
colour may be all that is needed in order to 
carry the effect : a lilt in idiom, not a systematic 
brogue; such a thing as Lady Gregory's deli- 
cious speech. 

But an effective dialect grows from the soil 
of the real, is selected from the real, is devel- 
oped by following the tendencies of the real. It 
is not made by a construction to accord with 
the author's notion of what a romantic or a 
picturesque language ought to be, but results 

242 



SETTING 

from an incubation in the author's mind upon 
actual experience. In this way only can it come 
to possess at once the freshness and variety of 
life and the appropriateness and unity of art. 
Stevenson jokes in one of his letters about 
the '^ushery" of his Black Arrow. He pre- 
tended that he coloured or gave a tone to his 
conversation by means of a made-up style of 
speech. He could not use the actual language 
of the fourteenth century because it would not 
have been understood; he could not use the 
language of his own day because it would have 
destroyed the romantic illusion of the past. He 
implies that his language was unreal; — that it 
was not selected from the language of a bygone 
day but artificially created with a tone of 
romance by cheap expedients, such as a few 
tushes and prithees and wiarrys. Stevenson 
does himself less than justice, for he had no 
small linguistic scholarship ; but the process at 
which he hints is not unfamiliar, and is one of 
the common sources of melodramatic unreality 
of tone in romantic novels. 

But it is not only "characters" and odd 
people who live in separate social groups; 
every one belongs to a "set" or to several 
"sets"; — those who are central and normal 

243 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

quite as much as the provincial and the eccen- 
tric. Every town above the size of a modest 
hamlet has its cliques and its circles. The 
larger the place, the more special and curious 
the points of contact of these groups. Only in 
a metropolis can enough folklorists be got to- 
gether to have a regular meeting, enough 
enthusiasts for chamber music to insure regu- 
lar concerts, enough Babis to form a congrega- 
tion. Only the metropolis has a Ghetto large 
enough for a city by itself. The more central 
the centre, therefore, the more abundant the 
divergences. 

The novel, by its nature, is a composition ap- 
pealing to the middle class. In novels, gener- 
ally speaking, the well-to-do middle class is 
normal, and other groups are defined by 
divergence from it. But within the middle 
class there are myriads of groups and it is in 
one of them that the novelist leads his own life. 
There he is at home; elsewhere he is but a 
spectator or at best a friendly visitor. Thack- 
eray's novels are all conversant with " So- 
ciety,' ' or with the group of dependents upon 
"Society." Dickens's normal person, a rather 
colourless individual, is definable as a modest, 
decent, young fellow, of less prosperous original 

244 



SETTING 

than Thackeray's people, who has to make his 
own way in a gentlemanly calling. " Society' ' 
and the poor are alike external to him. George 
Eliot sees everything through country eyes. 
Hardy is steeped in " Wessex" — and not upper- 
class Wessex. Broadly speaking, novelists tend 
to mark off as "outside," those social groups 
which are "outside" to the prepossessions of 
their youthful experience. Sometimes a novel- 
ist migrates to a new centre and to a new point 
of view, as Henry James moved out from 
America and then saw America as interestingly 
eccentric from the vantage-ground of Europe. 
Only from the outside can eccentricity be de- 
tected; only the writer born or educated into 
detachment can enjoy a group as an object of 
humour or as an object of contemplative 
delight. The insider loves and hates ; the out- 
sider admires and smiles. So it is usually with 
a note of externality that social groups are 
denned and exploited in literature; as the 
Scotch peasant by Scott, or the people of 
Thrums by Barrie, or the Creoles of Louisiana 
by Cable. 

The novel, being social and town-bred, uses 
as a material symbol distinguishing its social 
groups largely the interiors of houses, with 

245 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

their furnishings. The reason is that the con- 
ventional taste manifested in this way is the 
most delicate and precise social barometer and 
definer of classes. There are parlours which 
are sat in, and parlours which are never sat in 
except at a funeral. There are Wingless Vic- 
tory parlours, parlours with large conch shells 
on the mantelpiece, easy-going parlours with 
comfortable shabby chairs, parlours of every 
degree of expensiveness from the plush-three- 
piece-suit parlour to the sunken-fount ain-with- 
palms parlour. The Portland Place interior is 
necessary to define the Duchess of Wrexe ; and 
the Chinese dragons and the tapestry are al- 
most mystically typical of her disappearing 
glory. The shoproom and the parlour and the 
serving maid's cave below stairs are essential 
to mark off the two girls in The Old Wives' 
Tale. 

Of all the aspects of the setting of an indi- 
vidual life, the most inclusive and the most 
fundamental is the body of assumptions made 
by the social group of which that life is a part : 
the things taken for granted without discussion, 
commonly without explicit framing or even defi- 
nite consciousness of their existence. These 
fundamental assumptions are commonly ex- 

246 



SETTING 

pressed in the ways people have, in social habits 
in the tendency of current proverbs, in everyday 
judgments; they are incarnate in the customs 
of the community. So loyalty to the king used 
to be an assumption; no one questioned it, and 
when it was questioned, blasphemy was com- 
mitted. Thus it is now with national patriot- 
ism, or family obligation, or current religious 
faiths; they are taken for granted, they are 
bases of life. Every social group, little or big, 
coheres about a body of assumptions, com- 
monly many. Assumptions about social worth 
are the quaintest. To spin cotton is worthy; 
to weave wool is to belong to a lower social 
class; but to import goods from India is to be 
a member of an aristocracy. Or, all gainful 
occupations are socially inferior except brew- 
ing on a large scale ; or, you may labour in the 
fields, but you must not labour in the house. 

There can be no doubt that the setting plays 
a part in the recent novel far greater than 
that which it played in the novel of the past, 
even of the not very distant past. The novelist 
of today, — Mr. Cannan or Mr. Fowler as much 
as Mr. Conrad or Mr. Bennett — both labours 
and rejoices to present not only the character 
and his acts, but also the conditions out of 

247 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

which the character has grown, and the medium 
which has made his acts mean something defi- 
nite. In the novel of today, the characters 
spread abroad and thrust out tentacles and 
move and breathe, but would collapse into 
shapeless disorganization if they were lifted 
out of their proper element. The plot, too, is 
presented not as a thing in itself, but as some- 
thing caused and conditional, as a thing pos- 
sible and characteristic only in its own milieu ; 
— in a middle-class dissenting household with a 
place at Richmond, or in the Irish set of lead 
miners up Sinsinawa Creek; — as germinating 
in a special soil, begotten, grown, not made, 
and hence requiring an air which it can breathe 
and its proper food. As the setting has thus 
grown in importance and advanced in definite- 
ness, the efforts of authors to create — not the 
illusion — but the impression of reality, espe- 
cially as to the facts of sense, have greatly 
increased; and their technical skill in this re- 
spect has of course advanced enormously. A 
thin or inadequately studied setting is not 
acceptable in an author of the day. Elder 
authors insisted relatively less on this aspect 
of their novels, and were often satisfied with 
"neutral" or broadly conventionalized settings. 

248 



SETTING 

Place side by side the descriptive phrases of 
the eighteenth century and those of any con- 
temporary writer of fiction. Smollett's Jerry 
Melford was exposed to a violent storm; "the 
cordage rattled, the wind roared, the lightning 
flashed, the thunder bellowed, and the rain 
descended in a deluge.' ' The Spectator was in 
the country one pleasant evening, and "the 
birds made a most agreeable concert." In 
Mr. Hugh Walpole's The Dark Forest, the 
moon is now "a curved moon, dull gold, like 
buried treasure," now a "slip of an apricot 
moon. ' ' " The dark plum-colour in the evening 
sky soaked like wine into the hills." On a wet 
day the rain came down "in heavy plopping 
smothers." How piquant, how arresting and 
vivacious, how intimate also, and how immedi- 
ately real the effect of this sharply accented 
background. Yet how disturbing, how difficult 
to command a general view and to find a per- 
spective in the energetically distracting books 
of our day. Hazlitt says of Clarissa Harlowe : 
"Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interest- 
ing by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, 
in her gloves, in her samplers, her aunts and 
uncles — she is interesting in all that is unin- 
teresting." The glitter of small points, the 

249 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

vibratory scintillation of lively detail involves 
the danger of triviality, restlessness, or super- 
ficiality of effect. Only by a peculiar force of 
genius can a passion for the "number of 
things" of which "the world is so full" be 
made to contribute to the sense of unity, of law 
and largeness, and depth. All the greater is 
the achievement of those novelists such as 
Tolstoy, who can combine a very ample and 
spirited setting with a firm transaction and 
distinct characters. 

The causes of the preoccupation with setting 
are bound up with the general tendencies of 
thought in the last century, and especially with 
evolutionary conceptions. The evolutionary 
philosophy, of course, lays stress upon environ- 
ment. Living organisms draw their origin and 
sustenance from their environment; they are 
known only by their response to their environ- 
ment, and their life is throughout conditioned 
by their environment. The idea of a person- 
ality as emerging only from an environment, 
as understood only by reacting to it, as 
moulded by it, was inevitable in this age. In 
earlier authors who elaborate their setting, in 
Dickens, for example, the setting is indeed a 
setting, — a work of art wrought so that in it 

250 



SETTING 

the jewel character may be set forth to advan- 
tage. In Dickens's writing the setting is 
subordinate to the characters, adjusted to 
them, dependent upon them, almost made by 
them. Not before George Eliot is the interac- 
tion of character and surroundings, the setting 
as the source or medium of character, and the 
matter upon which the character must work in 
order to be manifest, at all definitely realized. 
Since her day, the setting has become not only 
a necessary datum, but a force, sometimes a 
fatal and overwhelming force, in the narrative. 
Even yet, the setting, the environment of char- 
acter, is conceived of by the novelist as stable, 
and is commonly looked at with ironic or pes- 
simistic eyes. The notion of the environment 
as itself evolving, a large and impartial seizure 
of human conditions, an imaginative realiza- 
tion of the multiform adaptations of character 
possible in relation to the same moral environ- 
ment, involving a subtler and more complete 
study of temperament than any hitherto at- 
tempted, all this offers a field only faintly and 
timidly entered by the writer of fiction. 



251 



CHAPTER VII 



THE POINT OF VIEW 



A novel is not merely the actual story which it 
tells, not merely the transaction, the characters, 
and the setting. With the best will in the 
world the author cannot keep out of what he 
writes his thoughts, his emotions, his senti- 
ments, his nature; and most authors have no 
desire to do so. A novel displays a point of 
view, it expresses preferences, it manifests at 
least a habit of. selective attention and a sense 
that one thing is more important than another. 
Always there has been breathed into it a per- 
vasive atmosphere, an air of thought. 

George Eliot's novels, for example, come 
before her in the form of the solution of definite 
problems. We are almost conscious in reading 
her novels that we see forming round her 
characters the medium in which they have their 
being, and that we see the characters them- 
selves growing up round some relation in life, 
some difficult human situation. One can dis- 

252 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

cern the problem incarnate in Maggie, or in 
Dorothea; each character is the answer to a 
question thrust at him by his relation to others. 
Lydgate is the answer to a problem ; so is Tom ; 
so is Silas Marner. In the end the characters 
"come alive,' ' they "stand on their feet"; but 
they are born of an agony about a question of 
conduct. The problems of Mr. Thomas Hardy 
are announced by that writer with bitter 
energy, sometimes on his very title-pages. 
Only with him the personages themselves are 
the problems. The world is not there for them 
to answer; they are there for the world to 
answer. What has the world replied to the 
question Tess? to the question Jude? to Elf ride? 
to Eustacia? The central interrogation put by 
his works, then, is about the justice of the 
social order, or of the universe itself, not about 
the righteousness of men. 

Sir Walter Scott in no such definite way pre- 
sents or conceives the central idea of his 
works. He is definitely sure of the better and 
worse, and never thinks of discussing it or mak- 
ing it the vital issue of his narratives. For 
him his judgments of moral worth are data, 
things assumed and certain, but definitely 
present in his work. His ideal — clear, simple, 

253 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

assured, and decent; active, picturesque, and 
generous; but mundane and superficial — has 
caused him to be praised by many critics of 
many schools for his moral health. In his own 
day he was a force in the social and political 
and even in the moral world. Euskin went so 
far as to call him "the truest philosopher of 
his time,'' and the " writer who has given the 
broadest view of ordinary modern thought/' 
and declared himself a "Tory of the old 
school — of Homer's or Sir Walter Scott's"; 
while Cardinal Newman traced the aspiration 
for a richer and more highly coloured life, the 
aspiration which was the source of the religious 
movement in which Newman was himself a 
part, chiefly among immediate influences to Sir 
Walter Scott's romances. 

In the writing of Dickens the moral ideas 
consciously presented in the forefront of the 
work are not very important. There are many 
such, sometimes insisted upon with portentous 
seriousness, as in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which 
a study of types of selfishness is announced as 
the subject of the book, or in Our Mutual 
Friend, in which a tremendous apparatus 
teaches Bella Wilfer humility and sweet un- 
selfishness. But the real moral element is the 

254 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

pervading spirit of compassion, and the spirit 
of respect for the individual. All tender things, 
poor children especially, are compassionately 
and sympathetically presented; the spirit of 
pity and the sense of individual worth are 
present as a temper, as an ever-present and 
conscious power guiding the work, and mani- 
fest through its total effect. 

And finally in all these writers, as in all 
others, below and besides these definite teach- 
ings and coherent ideals, there is something 
more subtle, — a temper, a taste, a quality, even 
more ethereal than Dickens's spirit of pity. 
There is a sophisticated and erudite voluptu^ 
ousness, for example in Mr. Hewlett's earlier^ 
novels, a full-bloodedness, sometimes coarse, in 
Fielding, a deep intellectual sense of responsi- 
bility in Meredith. In brief, there is in every 
novel something, call it an idea or a point of 
view, or a tone or temper, — something in the 
way of reflection, a judgment and preference, 
explicit or implicit, and distinguishable from 
the narrative in itself. 

In the field of ethical speculation novelists 
are copious and decided in expressing their 
views. 

The earliest full-bodied English realists, 
255 



THE ABT OF THE NOVELIST 

Bunyan and Defoe, were theologians. Bunyan 
creates his almost-novel, The Life and Death 
of Mr. Badman, — the strictly credible biog- 
raphy of a sordid sinner in a little English 
town, — about a moral problem, viewed in the 
light of his theology; Defoe interlards his 
story of Robinson Crusoe, the story of a soli- 
tary man thrown back on his own resources, 
material and spiritual, with long passages of 
theological reflection. The first great English 
novelist of character and sentiment, Samuel 
Eichardson, is likewise the first " problem' ' 
novelist: his tales are essentially nothing but 
the framing and the solution of problems as to 
the morals of sex. Casuistry, the consideration 
of cases of conscience, is the very stuff of his 
works. Not less is his great contemporary 
and antagonist, Henry Fielding, a systematic 
moralist. Fielding, the first great English 
novelist of the panorama of real life, opposes 
to the deliberate and meticulous moralizing of 
Eichardson a doctrine of the morality of the 
heart ; he makes the thesis of his greatest work 
the idea that no essentially sympathetic nature 
can become too debased for regeneration, no 
matter how often it fails, or how low it falls. 
He praises unworldly simplicity, attacks hypoc- 

256 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

risy and selfishness, and sermonizes boldly and 
frankly. "His wit is wise and detective, light- 
ing up a rogue and flashing upon a rascal like 
a policeman's lantern." Even the hard Smol- 
lett abounds in caustic reflection upon the in- 
justices of the world. Sterne and Dickens and 
Thackeray each in his way and with a differ- 
ence hymn the beauties of the gentler, the 
sympathetic virtues. Jane Austen presents 
the rational dignity of an ordered life not with- 
out true sentiment and controlled emotion. 
Charlotte Bronte rejoices in the energy of sin- 
cere passion, not unbridled, and in the glory 
of will. Stevenson proclaims joy, not of licence 
but of life, as a duty; Meredith is a conscious 
and elaborate moral philosopher; so is Hardy, 
so is Wells, so is Galsworthy. In other Eu- 
ropean countries the same thing is true. 
" Realists" or " scientific novelists" especially 
have doctrines to convey. How indeed can 
there be any humour if nothing is irrational? 
and how any seriousness if nothing is more 
worthy than anything else? Flaubert studies 
the downward course of a trivially selfish 
woman; Zola presents a picture of the horrors 
of drink, conceives an epic of degenerate in- 
heritance ; is a critic of the tendencies which he 

257 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

portrays. Tolstoy is a master teacher of his 
age. Barres and Holland, Galdos, Fogazzaro, 
d'Annunzio, all without exception raise with 
energy, whether with wisdom or not, questions 
as to the moral conventions of society and the 
quality of human conduct. All prose fiction 
involves a "criticism of life." 

To be sure, some writers, or most or all 
writers, are indifferent or hostile to certain 
accepted prepossessions as to moral excellence. 
They criticize the judgments of society and the 
laws of the state concerning marriage and 
divorce, or wealth, or education; but the more 
rebellious they are, the more consciously they 
moralize. The play of Mr. Wells 's mind, or Mr. 
Galsworthy's on marriage and property, of 
Mr. Barres 's on education results in the pro- 
mulgation of a theory, or even a program, of 
reform. These men are not morally indiffer- 
ent. A doctrine, then, commonly a doctrine of 
ethics, may be expected in a novel, sometimes 
explicit, sometimes manifest in the theme of the 
book, sometimes implied in the speeches of the 
characters, or in incidental words of the author. 

If this be true, if novels urge moral con- 
siderations, why is it that some novels which 
do so are the greater for their weight of sub- 

258 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

stance, while others are obnoxious because of 
the very definiteness of their moral teaching! 
Why do we respect War and Peace, but speak 
with a certain condescension of John Halifax, 
Gentleman, and deride Eugene Aram? We 
praise those who are sincere, who are not ex- 
ploiting the moral life of men for thrills and 
excitement, but whose laughter is genuine, and 
whose griefs are actually felt. It is the hollow- 
ness of Monte Crist o and Eugene Aram that is 
offensive ; it is the real anguish and indignation 
of Richard Feverel, the sincere amusement of 
Tristram Shandy, in which the reader rejoices. 
Again, we praise those who are intellectually 
great, who address themselves to great prob- 
lems and who treat them fundamentally. We 
find Trollope pleasant but superficial ; we know 
that Tolstoy rouses and stirs us profoundly; 
we do not agree with him, but he forces us to 
contemplate important matters in a serious 
way. 

We praise those who have energy. We over- 
look Balzac's lapses of taste, we slip by Hugo's 
shams, we endure the gloom of Wutliering 
Heights, we condone the diffuseness of It Is 
Never Too Late to Mend, because every one is 
vital. It is better to be crude than tame. But 

259 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

we praise highly only those who with energy 
unite control. There is something incoherent 
in the fine ardour of Mr. Wells, there is a 
spasmodic violence in Jack London, which 
proves not only that neither possesses the bal- 
ance of a consummate artist, but that neither 
has the force of high genius which endures to 
the perfection of its work. 

Finally, we praise those who have so made 
their moral ideas one with their whole concep- 
tion under the power of the imagination that 
nothing is left unassimilated or incongruous — 
in whom the moral doctrine does not overcome 
or override the concrete imaginative definite- 
ness of their tale but is inseparable from the 
narrative itself. A true imaginative creation, 
however strong the moral impulse, is not an 
allegory, still less is it a pamphlet, but is a 
coherent organic whole. This is true even of 
so symbolic a writer as Hawthorne, whose 
moral ideas are indeed substantial and capable 
of being separately expounded, are in fact the 
motive forces of his narratives, but are yet so 
absolutely incarnated in persons and so com- 
pletely expressed in concrete acts that to be 
separated they must be torn away from the 
stories and mutilated. This is true also even 

260 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

of Thackeray, whose little sermons are but 
pleasant comments on a narrative complete and 
autonomous, — not its guides and controllers. 
But even in works as genuine as Uncle Tom's 
Cabin or Norris's The Pit the fire does not burn 
clear ; the imagination flames, but cannot wholly 
reduce the mass of observation and thought to 
itself. 

Novelists themselves will not permit their 
readers to put wholly aside the moral aspect of 
fiction. But naive and inexpert readers judge 
this moral aspect crudely and by inapplicable 
standards. Some like books because they like 
the people in them, and condemn other books 
because they condemn the characters. 

The idea that only admirable characters 
should be presented in works of fiction is not 
consciously held by any but very young readers, 
but is approached by those who do not care to 
read authors who " insist on their becoming 
acquainted with people they would never care 
to meet in real lie," as superficial readers used 
to say about Mr. Howells. The most impor- 
tant function of literary art is to extend the 
necessarily narrow limits of experience, and by 
wakening an imaginative sympathy with for- 
tunes alien to our own, or with natures which, 

261 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

though human, we cannot easily enter, to 
strengthen the foundations of our humanity, 
and to enlarge our conception of ourselves. 
But there is this atom of truth included in the 
idea that the value of a work is in proportion 
to the ethical value of the characters in it; — 
the power to conceive and to create genuinely 
lovely personalities is itself a mark of inner 
imaginative nobility. To create a coherently 
worthy and interesting human being, to im- 
agine finely toned men and women, not prig- 
gish and not violent; not giggling or affected 
or petty; with positive elements of loftiness 
and force and charm; but credible, human, 
actual; — Lucy Desborough, Henry Esmond, 
Leatherstocking, — is to stand in so far higher 
than those authors do who cannot catch that 
finer note. That Fielding's best have in 
them something of grossness, that Miss Jane 
Austen's best lack ardour and self-sacrifice, 
that Dickens's most virtuous are mushy, that 
Balzac's most virtuous are vulgar, are mani- 
fest weaknesses of those great authors, while 
it is again their praise that Fielding's bet- 
ter personages should be so generous, Jane 
Austen's so delicately right, that Dickens's 
should so joy and sorrow with others, that 

262 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

Balzac's should possess so spirited an energy. 
The presence of a high ideal of good is an 
excellence; but it does not follow that the 
absence of intense evil is also an excellence. 
On the contrary, evil is a necessity in the 
highest imaginative work, but good is a luxury. 
Without evil there is no action. Good — the 
attained good, balanced perfection — is in itself 
static. Good is a power only in conflict, and to 
be in conflict it must oppose an evil. The lower 
or inappropriate good becomes evil. The 
nature of any good becomes apparent only 
when it is threatened or fails to recreate itself, 
that is to say when it is fighting or dying. The 
novelist who is not occupied with evil — with 
pain or sorrow or sin or crime — with good as 
a live force, that is to say, in struggle for 
existence, and accordingly with evil as its 
measure, has not fathomed the depths of char- 
acter or understood the nature of the universe. 
He suffers from inadequacy of motive. A 
great imagination compasses and is moved by 
great things, especially great evils. Without 
the ability to envisage evil, it has and can 
have no moving force. But it must know evil 
as evil: not as a mere excitement, but as a 
serious concern of man, as grave and terrible. 

263 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

Some people judge novels by the standard of 
conventional decency, and praise them in pro- 
portion to their reticence. Eeticence and de- 
cency require no defence; without them there 
is no human dignity possible. By them we are 
raised above the hard conditions of our life. 
But a compelled reticence as to subject- 
matter, timorous silence about the deep and 
plain facts of life, weakens the entire moral 
fibre of a man or a book. Limitations upon the 
free play of mind have been compared to 
blinders. Eeally they are tinted and distorted 
spectacles. It is not that every writer is 
obliged to contemplate all of life, — every pomp 
and vanity of this wicked world, and all the 
sinful desires of the flesh. Plenty of good 
novels have nothing to say about politics, or 
money, and some have nothing to say about 
love. They tell the truth, though not all the 
truth. But to leave out, to gloss over, to dis- 
solve away, not in obedience to temperament 
and interest, but in obedience to a fear or a 
command — that it is which "maketh a lie." 
Sex, for example, is a profoundly important 
physical fact with spiritual consequences. The 
finger on the lips, the tiptoe step, and the 
averted face will not avail to annul the facts 

264 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

and consequences of sex in life, and forbidding 
the sincere consideration of them in books 
would shut up Homer and Shakespeare and the 
Bible. There are indeed writers who violate 
the reticence of convention not frankly but cun- 
ningly, in order to obtain that shock of strange- 
ness which is essential to interest. They are 
insincere, as all sensationalism is insincere, and 
they manifest the paucity of their own creative 
power. 

Some novels teach a specific doctrine; many 
authors hold a philosophy; all books and 
authors express a bent of mind or inner tem- 
per. To illustrate. In George Eliot's Silas 
Marner there is a doctrine, so definite, so con- 
spicuous and insistent, that the story might 
well be called a fable, and end with a moral 
tagged at the conclusion. The teaching of the 
book is that the force which leads to excellence 
in human conduct is sympathetic and affection- 
ate service for others. It is loving and caring 
for the child Eppie that saves Marner; it is 
self-seeking that destroys Dunstan; it is the 
timidity of a selfish man that impairs the life 
of Godfrey. The central theme is the blighting 
and regeneration of Marner 's life by the loss 
and the regaining of a natural human affec- 

265 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

tion. The moral is if anything too obvious, 
too mechanical and laboured. Like any fiction 
presenting the consequences of conduct, the 
story raises the question whether the con- 
sequences are inevitable, whether any fiction 
can indeed lay the foundation of truth. Sup- 
pose Eppie had turned out badly — children 
do. Suppose she had been cold-hearted or 
greedy; suppose she had been thievish or im- 
pure. What would have happened to Marner? 
Is it probable that the mere act of sacrifice, 
the mere instinctive tendency to kindness 
would have benefited him? Would he have re- 
turned to his hermit life? Would he have been 
the more completely shattered? What if God- 
frey and Nancy had had a child. The more 
one raises such questions, the more one sees 
that a book does not so much teach morals as 
bring to consciousness the moral ideas which 
are already latent in the reader's mind. 

Hence it is interesting to find in Silas Marner 
below the obvious sermon a philosophy, a view, 
the strength and definiteness of which in George 
Eliot's mind is not made evident except by a 
comparison of this book with others of her 
writings. George Eliot has a doctrine of the 
measure of moral worth much more thorough- 

266 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

going than her doctrine of the impulses which 
lead men to pursue the good. She believes that 
that is good which is good in the long run for 
mankind as a whole, and encourages the prac- 
tice of conscious and thoughtful deliberation. 
She does not put much faith in a morality of 
impulse or instinct or mere goodheartedness, 
but in a morality of foresight, of strenuous 
self-abnegating reason. The object is the gen- 
eral social good ; the method is well-considered 
intention and careful consideration as to the 
results of action. A " general honest thought" 
would be a poor excuse with her. Still less 
would she condone warm-hearted negligence. 
The chief object of her attack is a heedlessly 
selfish person, like Arthur Donnithorne, who 
repents once his eyes are open to the real effects 
of his deeds, or Tito Melema, who goes down- 
ward from mere facile self-glorifying deceit to 
cheating, to betrayal, to treasonous baseness, 
through lack of courage to face distant conse- 
quences. It is the clear-sighted rectitude of 
Nancy Lammeter which she especially praises ; 
the self-deceiving indistinctness of Godfrey 
which she especially condemns. It is not the 
wicked but the slack whom she assails, and 
not the ecstatic but the wise whom she praises. 

267 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

There is a touch of science about her morals, 
of a detached insistence that counting the cost 
is essential, which is peculiar to her. 

In Sir Walter Scott the inculcation of a defi- 
nite moral lesson is not the obvious purpose of 
the novel, but none the less a doctrine is com- 
municated, and a judgment of life is the impel- 
ling force of the story. His compositions are 
a stimulus to picturesque and decided action. 
They all cry : 

" Sound, sound the trumpet, fill the fife; 
To all the sensual world proclaim 
One crowded hour of glorious life 
Is worth an age without a name." 

Sir Walter is the most vigorous apostle of vivid 
strenuousness. He is an aristocrat and a con- 
servative because aristocracy is interesting and 
conservatism is picturesque. His temper is 
not selfish or stupid. He values the distinc- 
tion of classes and would maintain it vigor- 
ously, but he prizes and respects every class; 
he treasures the riches of antiquity and the 
power of tradition, not blindly for themselves 
but as a source of social strength and beauty. 
In truth, below his conservatism and his tradi- 
tionalism we can discern the preferences which 

268 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

made him the apostle of a romantic spirit in 
government and even in religion to his genera- 
tion. He loved a social order full of variety 
and contrast, a society of distinguishable and 
clearly marked groups, not one in which 
there is a democratic community of individuals, 
all dressed alike, all looking alike, and every 
one pursuing his own ends. The aristocratic 
society marks classes by external difference of 
appearance, cherishes quaint ancient usage, is 
at once more orderly and more interesting to 
the view than a democratic society. It is this 
— this salience, this sharpness of conscious dif- 
ference — which delighted Sir Walter; his con- 
servatism was a matter of aesthetic preference, 
not of rational analysis. 

In each of these authors, then, there is be- 
neath or apart from the morals of the stories 
a point of view, a theory of life, conscious or 
unconscious. But deeper still there is a tem- 
perament. Much more moving in George 
Eliot's writings than the moral lesson or the 
general ethical philosophy is the sentiment 
about life which rests in the brooding depths 
of her nature. To her, human life — every 
human life — is a grave and painful mystery. 
Every nature bears within itself a spirit, an 

269 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

ideal, inherited from the past and urgent to be 
realized, and meets in conflict a condition about 
it, also created by the past, with which this 
ideal cannot be wholly reconciled, and before 
which the individual must bow. There are 
those who accept, who yield, who patiently and 
with heroic submission make the best they can 
of life, who 

" Do their broken weapons rather use, 
Than their bare hands.' ' 

Such was the first sorrow and the great obedi- 
ence of Mary, as George Eliot conceived it, 
and such is in a measure the sorrow of every 
human being. And this fate George Eliot 
accepts not defiantly or sternly, but with a 
grave quietude: the tone of Adam Bede, of 
Maggie Tulliver, of Dorothea, of Eomola, the 
temper of Silas Marner. For Nancy and 
Eppie, for Silas, even for Godfrey, there is a 
shadowed happiness possible, a crumb of com- 
fort, humbly not joyfully accepted. Thus in 
George Eliot, beneath her conscious doctrine 
and beneath her ethical philosophy lies this 
tone or spirit — this sobering but not gloomy 
sense of the painful mystery of the universe, 

270 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

of the inevitable cramping if not of the in- 
evitable tragedy of life. 

Again, deep below the philosophy of Scott 
are his temperament and physical constitution. 
He delights in bold firmly outlined scenes, in 
decided contrasts alike of form and colour. 
His descriptions manifest power both of group- 
ing and of salient detail, but no delicacy of 
nuance. His style is neither subtle nor pro- 
found, but firm and vivid. His senses were 
blunt, his body healthily restless when not pro- 
vided with activity. In brief, the temperament 
of the relatively insensitive man of motor 
character is written decisively upon all his 
work. 

The novels of Eobert Louis Stevenson, un- 
like many of his shorter stories, do not often 
inculcate moral doctrines with external sym- 
bolic definiteness. The inner moral life is 
dealt with energetically in Markheim and Will 
of the Mill, less seriously and less profoundly 
in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But in Treasure 
Island and Kidnapped is there any doctrine? 
They seem to be written just for fun, for the 
sheer pleasure of excitement in a story of 
action. But that is a doctrine. It teaches at 
least that fun is worth while, that adventure 

271 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

is a fine kind of fun. With less definiteness, 
but not ineffectively it teaches a morality the 
opposite of George Eliot's deliberate calcula- 
tion of consequences, and justifies leading one's 
life as an exploit, not hesitating on the brink 
and measuring distances, but plunging in and 
swimming out beyond one's depth. It justi- 
fies forgetting the pettiness of circumstance 
and the unrelenting certainty of hard condi- 
tions and the tameness of actuality in the 
brisker change and the more vivid uncertainty 
and the more lively coloured life of a special 
kind of imagination. 

But the real inner doctrine of Stevenson's 
work is that spirit of delight in the contempla- 
tion of activity to the reality of which in his 
own life there is abundant testimony. He tells 
us that he never felt a moment's dulness in a 
railway station, there was so much to look at. 
To the healthy body every kind of experience 
that does not threaten life and is not wearisomely 
repeated is probably pleasant. It is pleasant 
to go hungry and cold and wet whipping the 
streams; it is pleasant to lie idly on one's back 
watching the clouds float overhead ; it is pleas- 
ant to drag in logs, and pleasant to lie by the 
fire; it is pleasant to labour in the hayfield, to 

272 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

ride, to walk, to talk, to sleep. Whatever 
Stevenson saw lie rejoiced in. 

" The world is so full of a number of things, 
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings." 

Nor was this delight aesthetically sterile, the 
shivering admiration of the duffer, who cannot 
swim, or the purely selective admiration of the 
hunter after human bric-a-brac. Stevenson's 
character was itself active; and his delight in 
life is that of a sweet-tempered invalid who 
blesses the activity in which he cannot himself 
engage. There is no snobbishness in him. But 
he is not aimlessly strenuous, not a hustler, 
either of the trotting or the slashing type. His 
fine young men, not too brilliant or too keen, 
get into danger by an excess of curiosity or of 
confidence. They meet it with something bet- 
ter than serenity, with a certain relish, even 
at the moment of fear, and they prove their 
manhood not by wisdom, but by steadfastness 
and devotion, with a certain graceful readiness 
to accept what comes, be it martyrdom or joy. 
The Sieur de Maletroit's Door is the type of all 
the narratives ; the heroes, David and Jim and 
Archie and Henry, all press into a dark pas- 
sageway in life, meet the unexpected danger 

273 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

with genuine, shivering, boyish fear but with 
desperate boyish courage, fight with zest, and 
conquer with grace. 

In the novels of Henry James the ground- 
work of the action is singularly like that in 
Stevenson, while everything else in them is so 
directly contradictory as to seem intended to 
oppose every thesis of Stevenson about life and 
conduct. The one thing alike in the two 
novelists is that in each the main characters go 
it blind into a dark passageway. Stevenson's 
heroes plunge into physical danger. In James 's 
novels the adventurer who sails without a 
chart into the waters of a dangerous ocean is 
a prosperous American who enters the compli- 
cated society of aristocratic Europe. The 
fascination of life to Stevenson is in the joy 
of combat and of victory over danger. The 
fascination of life to James is the somewhat 
awed contemplation of danger itself. To 
James danger is real, alarming, ever-present; 
to be met with circumspection, with caution 
and deliberate consideration; to be circum- 
vented commonly rather than to be overcome. 
The mood of his writing, accordingly, is not of 
zest but of anxiety. 

In James as in Stevenson, the novels seem 
274 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

to have taken their beginning from the setting. 
The authors seem to have said to themselves, 
" Given these surroundings, such and such 
things would be likely to happen, ' ' not, ' ' Given 
these people, they would do thus and so," or, 
" Given these events, they fit such and such 
people in such and such conditions. ' ' With 
Stevenson, the setting is the spirit of place, 
the instinctive romantic response to a physical 
scene. In James it is the more complex but no 
more subtle quality of a moral environment, 
the total spirit of a social order. The matrix 
of his novels is a better-class or even aristo- 
cratic European group, now French, now Eng- 
lish, now international. Each group is pro- 
vided with a great body of commands and an 
even more formidable code of prohibitions, — 
assumed, acted on, never avowed, — fixed and 
fundamental, and so completely assimilated by 
those who have grown up in them that without 
ever coming to open expression they have be- 
come grounded in the very nature of the mem- 
bers of the group. Thus Europeans are 
* ' finished.' ' The man who is an outsider to 
these conventions, the American, however 
shrewd or noble, is an enemy, and — so co- 
herent the group, so at one with itself in its 

275 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

acceptance of its fundamental ideas — a certain 
victim. He must conform or suffer, sometimes 
in pocket, sometimes in affection, but always 
and essentially in self-esteem. Daisy Miller 
must die because she is talked about; Newman 
must carry about a sense of disgust and hu- 
miliation because he has found other people 
rascals; the Princess of in The Golden Bowl 
must suffer the same sickening sorrow more 
intensely because it is her husband and her 
friend who have been unworthy. The hero's 
or heroine's sense of personal dignity, — it is 
this which is attacked and this which is de- 
fended; and the hero suffers in this point, 
sometimes obvious personal humiliation, some- 
times a desperate consciousness of unworthi- 
ness, sometimes the sense of debasement which 
results from being obliged to think worse of 
human nature than you had been accustomed to. 
James's heroes use up their intellectual 
strength in becoming aware of the enormous, 
baffling mass of convention about them, in 
focusing the complicated problem which arises 
out of their relation to their alien surround- 
ings, and in endeavouring to find the solution 
— a difficult one — imposed by their own nature 
and the conditions. The energy of their will is 

276 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

mostly consumed in combating the urgency of 
their raw and nninstructed impulses. In the 
end, the result is very often the victory of 
inhibition over action. The characters know 
that: 

" Unto the man of yearning thought 
And aspiration, to do nought 
Is in itself almost an act; " 

They forget the warning: 

" But woe to thee if once thou yield 
Unto the act of doing naught! " 

A certain resemblance is to be traced be- 
tween the ideas of George Eliot and of Henry 
James. In both the environment is unfriendly 
to the individual's well-being; sometimes it is 
merely a cramping limitation, at other times it 
is the deadly enemy of his freedom. u We sym- 
pathize with the individual; we know that the 
triumph of the general is inevitable." And 
from this view which they hold in common 
arises an ethics which has common elements, 
an ethics of caution and foresight, of wary 
preparation and the calculation of distant con- 
sequences. Yet the larger determining features 
of their philosophy, of their moral temper, are 

277 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

very different. The two are widely unlike in 
that most profound element in the view of life, 
the valuation of worths. In George Eliot the 
most precious of all things is the general good, 
and the most precious thing in the individual 
is moral coherence in holding to that great 
end, the larger end, in which the individual 
finds his soul by losing it. The main worth in 
Henry James is the sense of honour. The 
dangers which threaten the individual are in- 
deed many; — corrupt Europe robs him of 
money or love or reputation, — but what hurts 
most is humiliation. One feels of James's 
finest souls, — of Maizie and the Princess, that 
they have learned to renounce, to renounce 
with wounded but loving hearts, but their chief 
wonder is the dignity that surrounds them, and 
not their love and purpose. Again, George 
Eliot and James differ in weight and largeness. 
Relatively, the later writer is superficial. Pain- 
ful as the tone of his writings is, like hers, it 
is not like hers gravely and nobly sad, because 
the pains suffered and the consolations received 
are not so largely and deeply human as hers. 

The attempts to characterize the thought and 
temper of the authors referred to have been 
introduced for purposes of illustration. They 

278 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

are meant to exemplify the truth that the 
thought and temper of novelists are at least as 
important in the building up of their works 
as plot and character or any other recognized 
technical or imaginative element. These anal- 
yses are no doubt sketchy and inadequate ; this 
or that one may be erroneous; but they take 
one necessary way of approach to the apprecia- 
tion of an author. Critics of deeper insight or 
finer imagination might supplement or correct 
them, but only by the same method by which 
they have been formed : the ardent and obedient 
attempt to realize the author's meaning im- 
aginatively from his works followed by the 
effort to make explicit in exposition that which 
has been implicit in the narrative. 

At the same time, the most nearly adequate 
and most sincere and thorough interpretation 
by a critic of the finest insight must always fall 
short of the full meaning, even the full intel- 
lectual and moral meaning, of a truly imagina- 
tive novel. That meaning is inseparable from 
the actual book itself ; it is the soul of the char- 
acters and events ; it is the life of the very turn 
of phrase. Abstract expression may approxi- 
mate it, but can never reach it. All imagina- 
tion has a quality of infinity; it defies cate- 

279 



THE ART OF THE NOVELIST 

gories, and refuses to be clamped down in ab- 
stract terms. When a dogma is adequate to a 
work of art, or even when its definite doctrine 
is easily separable from the expression of it, 
there is in so far a defect in the work. In so 
far The Egoist is not so great as Richard 
Feverel, or Silas Marner as Adam Bede. The 
conception so often insisted upon in this book, 
iof imaginative unity, is applicable here also. 
The doctrine and sentiment are one with the 
'story, are inseparable from it, are inevitably, 
not consciously, present, and are inevitably, not 
consciously, assimilated by the reader. This 
I very intangibility is the source of their great 
power. Without arousing antagonism they 
itake possession of the mind, and by controlling 
the sympathies and stimulating the visionary 
powers determine the direction of the emotions 
both as to their objects and their character. 
The analytic effort, moreover, to express ab- 
stractly and explicitly that which is concrete 
Hand implicit in the book itself is attended by 
tcertain dangers. There is the danger of 
formulas, of applying as principles what are 
only methods, of taking the abstractions drawn 
from one type of works and applying them to 
another type which has grown from different 

280 



THE POINT OF VIEW 

conceptions. It is unsound to condemn Kim 
because it is not so subtle as The Golden Bowl, 
to condemn Scott because he is not Miss 
Austen, or Hardy because he is not Meredith. 
There are many examples of such narrow 
criticism, notably by novelists themselves, who 
feel that the failure of other writers to apply 
their methods is a condemnation of the meth- 
ods. Besides the danger of losing flexibility is 
the danger of satisfying oneself with the fram- 
ing of an abstraction about an author, as if 
the object of reading were criticism. Some 
sophisticated readers, when they have found 
the phrase for an author, can see nothing be- 
yond it. This is idolatry — the worship of the 
image which the critic has made unto himself 
— a sin which blinds the eyes and hardens the 
heart. 

At the same time, analytic criticism is not 
useless. It is often, — perhaps generally, — 
true, that a critical interpretation of a great 
author's nature has been necessary to mediate 
between him and the public, even the intelligent 
public. So Coleridge and Wilson interpreted 
Wordsworth to the English public. So Thack- 
eray had to be defended from the charge of 
cynicism, and Stevenson had to be justified as 

281 



THE AET OF THE NOVELIST 

something better than a mere writer of tales 
of adventure. With all these men it was their 
philosophy, their tone and temper, more than 
their art, which it was the task of criticism 
to expound. The practice, moreover, of critical 
analysis has its own value. The effort to grasp 
and define the tendency of an author's thought, 
so long as this effort does not usurp the place 
of real and direct assimilation, assists in inten- 
sifying and refining the reader's imaginative 
re-creation of the author's vision. To struggle 
with a great author's mind manifests the great- 
ness of a great book, and shows how distin- 
guished an achievement it may be to make a 
book which falls far short of being very great. 
If this little study of the novel leaves its read- 
ers with the feeling that it is a tremendous 
thing to write a fine novel, that success is com- 
plicated, that failure is easy even for a gifted 
mind, if it encourages its readers to be hos- 
pitable to many kinds of excellence, to be re- 
spectful before even qualified achievement, it 
will not have failed in the purpose for which it 
was written. 



282 



INDEX 



Abbot, The, v. Scott. 

Abnormality, 58, 137. 

Adam Bede, v. Eliot. 

Addison, his humour, 190; 
Spectator, 249. 

Adventures of Harry Rich- 
mond, The, v. Thackeray. 

Allegory, 146. 

American Novels of Locality, 
238. 

Anna Karenina, v. Tolstoy. 

d'Annunzio, 181. 

Arabian Nights, The, 51. 

Aristotle, 19, 104, 118; on 
tragic character, 160, 164. 

Austen, Jane, 257, 262 ; Mans- 
field Park, 158; Pride and 
Prejudice, 13, 47, 84, 89, 
103, 142, 153. 



Bagehot, Walter, on Pick- 
wick, 133. 

Balzac, H. de, 44, 57, 58, 62, 
64, 154, 219, 259, 262; Le 
Cure de Tours, 137; Eu- 
genie Grandet, 41 ; Le Peau 
de Chagrin, 57; Le Pere 
Goriot, 15; Ursule Mirouet, 
41. 

Bangs, J. K., on humour and 
pathos, 182. 

Baptism, The, v. de Maupas- 
sant. 

Barres, Maurice, 157, 258. 

Barrie, J. M., 208, 245. 



Barriers Burned Away, v. 
Roe. 

Beaconsfield, Lord, 36. 

Beckford, William, 33. 

Beginning, 101. 

Bennett, Arnold, 61, 148, 151, 
199, 248; Hilda Lessways, 
15, 142; The Old Wives' 
Tale, 104, 158, 246. 

Besant, Walter, 82. 

Biography, 17. 

Black Arrow, The, v. Steven- 
son. 

Black, William, 35. 

Bleak House, v. Dickens. 

Bradley, A. C, on Shake- 
speare's tragic characters, 
160. 

Bronte, Charlotte, 238, 257; 
Jane Eyre, 204. 

Bronte, Emily, Wuthering 
Heights, 259. 

Bulwer-Lytton, 176, 179; Eu- 
gene Aram, 259; The Last 
of the Barons, 234. 

Bunyan, John, The Life and 
Death of Mr. Badman, 
256; The Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress, 148. 

Butcher, Samuel Henry, on 
Antigone, 166. 

Butler, Samuel, The Way of 
All Flesh, 109. 

Butterworth, Hezekiah, 187. 

Biittnerbauer, Der, v. Polenz. 

Byron, Lord, 55, 214. 



283 



284 



INDEX 



Cable, G. W., 239, 245. 

Callista, v. Newman. 

Caiman, Gilbert, 247. 

Castle of Otranto, The, v. 
Walpole. 

Castle Rackrent, v. Edge- 
worth. 

Catherine, v. Thackeray. 

Cervantes, 211; Don Quixote, 
191. 

Character, allegory, 146; 
complexity, 141; fore- 
ground and background, 
152; evolution, plasticity, 
153; nihilists of character, 
115; observation vs. imagi- 
nation, 35; relation to set- 
ting, 217, 248, 250; v. 
French, Greek, and Shake- 
spearean tragic character. 

Character painting, abstract 
analysis, 130; clothes, 
crockery, etc, 217; elabo- 
rated description, 127; mi- 
nute actions, the little 
things, 124; aroma of per- 
sonality, 126; habitual ac- 
tions, 123; impulsive ac- 
tions, 120; deliberate 
actions, 118. 

Characters, admirable vs. des- 
picable, 261; normal, su- 
per-normal, abnormal, 137; 
propriety vs. impropriety, 
264; evolution from set- 
ting, 250; relation to set- 
ting, 248; simplification, 
142; the tragic personal- 
ity, 160. 

Chaucer, on tragedy, 169. 

Churchill, Winston, The Cri- 
sis, 129, 

Clarissa Harlowe, v. Richard- 



Cloister and the Hearth, The, 

v. Reade. 
Coleridge, on Shakespeare, 

178; The Ancient Mariner, 

237. 
Collins, Wilkie, 92; The 

Woman in White, 78. 
Collins, William, 214. 
Colonel Carter of Carters- 

ville, v. Smith. 
Comedy and Tragedy, sources 

analogous, 182. 
Comedy, v. humour 
Conrad, Joseph, 248; Ty- 
phoon, 199. 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 214; 

The Leatherstocking Tales, 

142, 262. 
Count of Monte Cristo, The, 

v. Dumas. 
Crabbe, George, 62. 
Craik, Mrs D. M. Mulock, 

John Halifax, 259. 
Crisis, The, v. Churchill. 
Criticism, limitations, 279; 

value, 281. 
Cure de Tours, Le, v. Balzac. 

Daisy Miller, v. James. 

Dante, The Divine Comedy, 
51. 

Dark Forest, The, v. Walpole 

Daudet, Alphonse, The Nabob, 
36; Numa Roumestam, 61; 
Tartarin de Tarascon, 193. 

Davenant, Sir William, Gon- 
dibert, 145 

David Copperfield, v Dickens 

David Simple, v. Marryat. 

Defoe, Daniel, 39; Adven- 
tures of a Cavalier, 17; 
Journal of the Plague 
Year, 53; Robinson Cru- 
soe, 52, 69, 110, 201, 256. 



INDEX 



285 



Dialect, 241. 

Diana of the Crossways, v. 
Meredith. 

Dickens, 64, 66, 92, 104, 133, 
154, 174, 199, 218, 219, 
238, 245, 251, 257, 262; 
Bleak House, 77; David 
Copperfield, 42, 44, 87, 98, 
145, 173, 176; Dombey and 
Son, 126, 177; Martin 
Chuzzlewit, 15, 124, 130, 
145, 173, 186, 254; Nicho- 
las Nickleby, 40, 124, 133, 
145; Oliver Twist, 40, 42, 
134; Our Mutual Friend, 
254; Pickwick Papers, 98, 
133, 146, 184, 185, 192; A 
Tale of Two Cities, 77, 103, 
126, 159; dramatized, 12; 
pathetic fallacy in, 205; 
Taine on, 205. 

Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 
v. Stevenson. 

Dombey and Son, v. Dickens. 

Don Quixote, v. Cervantes 

Dostoevsky, 58, 60, 80, 141, 
179; Crime and Punish- 
ment, 181; The Idiot, 138; 
The Brothers Karamazov, 
38, 83, 113, 158, 174, 181. 

Doyle, Sir Conan, Sherlock 
Holmes, 78. 

Drama, 11, 15. 

Dream Butter, 44. 

Duchess of Wrexe, The, v. 
Walpole. 

Dumas, 232; The Count of 
Monte Cristo, 112, 176; 
The Three Musketeers, 55, 
83, 112, 146, 176, 228; Le 
Vicomte de Bragelonne, 
229. 

Edgeworth, Maria, 239; Cas- 
tle Rackrent, 241. 



Edward— ballad, 76. 

Egoist, The, v. Meredith. 

Eliot, George, 22, 29, 119, 
147, 199, 251, 252, 245, 
269, 272, 277; Adam Bede, 
37, 59, 81, 120, 124, 131, 
156, 158, 171, 208, 222, 
267, 280; Mr Gilfil's Love 
Story, 130 ; Middlemarch, 
14, 59, 69, 88, 120; The 
Mill cm the Floss, 37, 59, 
162, 171; Romola, 70, 91, 
120, 156, 159, 161, 171, 222, 
267; Silas Marner, 176, 
265, 267, 280; The Spanish 
Gypsy, 166; Scenes. 

End, 103. 

Energy, 259. 

Epic, 13. 

Ethics of author, 255. 

Eugene Aram, v. Bulwer- 
Lytton. 

Eugenie Grandet, v. Balzac. 



Fable, v. plot. 

Far from the Madding Crowd, 
v. Hardy. 

Fiction, statistics of popular- 
ity, 3; statistics of produc- 
tion, 1, 4, 5, 7. 

Fielding, Henry, 106, 154, 
215, 255, 256^ 262; Joseph 
Andrews, 192; Tom Jones, 
14, 37, 38, 44, 79, 110, 151, 
153, 155; Jonathan Wild, 
140. 

Flaubert, Gustave, 58, 62, 
212, 257. 

Fogazzaro, 258. 

Forsytes, The, v. Galsworthy. 

Frankenstein, v. Shelley 

French tragic character, 143, 
170. 



286 



INDEX 



Galdos, 258. 

Galsworthy, 257, 258; The 

Forsytes, 127; his humour, 

194. 
Genius, imagination, 260. 
German provincial novels, 

238. 
Gil Bias, v. Le Sage. 
Goethe, Faust, 218; The 

Sorrows of Werther, 203. 
Gogol, Taras Bulba, 37. 
Golden Bowl, The, v. James. 
Goldsmith, Oliver, The Vicar 

of Wakefield, 192 
Goncourts, The, 116, 117. 
Gorki, Maxim, 157. 
Gozzi, Carlo, on dramatic sit- 
uations, 15. 
Gray, Thomas, 35, 214. 
Greek tragic character, 143, 

169. 
Gregory, Lady, 242. 
Guy Mannering, v. Scott. 

Hajji Baba, v. Morier. 

Hardy, Thomas, 29, 67, 157, 
199, 208, 216, 238, 245, 253, 
257 ; Far from the Madding 
Crowd, 81, 87, 126; The 
Mavor of Carterbridge, 41; 
A Pair of Blue Eyes, 37, 
173; The Return of the Na- 
tive, 92, 104, 106, 128, 137, 
222; Tess of the D'Urber- 
villes, 69, 85, 93, 95, 131, 
162, 171; Under the 
Greenwood Tree, 126; The 
Woodlands, 135. 

Harte, Bret, 239, 240 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 140, 
260. 

Hazlitt, William, on Clarissa 
Harlowe. 249. 

Heart of Midlothian, The, v. 
Scott. 



Henry Esmond, v. Thacke- 
ray. 

Hewlett, Maurice, 67, 255; 
Richard Yea-and-Nay, 234. 

Historical novel, 54, 223; 
vogue 1830-70, 5. 

Hogarth, William, The Idle 
Apprentice, 150. 

Homer, 265; the pathetic in, 
196. 

Hope, Anthony, 55. 

Howells, W D, 261; Silas 
Lapham, 132. 

Hudson, W. H., The Purple 
Land (Banda Oriental), 
54. 

Hugo, Victor, Les Mis^rables, 
84, 137; Notre Dame de 
Paris, 159, 199, 222; his 
energy, 259 

Humour, dependent on lis- 
tener, 182; and incongru- 
ity, 184; and local colour, 
241; of mellow humanity, 
191, 194; national types of, 
183; partisan, 193; range 
in novels, 196; of vexatious 
superiority, 188. 

Humphrey Clinker, v. Smol- 
lett. 

Hundredth Man, The, v. 
Stockton 

Hyne, Cutcliffe-, 33. 

Hypatia, v Kingsley. 

Idiot, The, v. Dostoevsky. 

Imagination, 33; breadth of 
sympathy, 261 ; the founda- 
tion of character, 114, 126, 
132, 150; the foundation of 
plot, 80; the foundation of 
setting, 211; and local 
colour, 240; genius, 260; 
the harmonizer, 36, 64; in 
historical novels, 232; the 



INDEX 



287 



ideal imagination, 43; the 
imagined vs. the observed, 
35, 42; the imagined vs. the 
mechanically reasoned, 42; 
the imagined vs. the willed, 
37. 

Imaginative unity, 33, 36, 43, 
64, 81, 114, 132, 150, 211, 
232, 240, 260, 280. 

Improbability, v. probability. 

Isaiah, his humour, 189. 

It Is Never Too Late to Mend, 
v. Reade. 

Ivanhoe, v. Scott. 



James, G. P. R., Richelieu, 
234. 

James, Henry, 58, 60, 66, 104, 
110, 245, 274-278; The 
American, 276; Daisy Mil- 
ler, 276; The Golden Bowl, 
276; What Maizie Knew, 
278; fiction competing with 
life, 48; on Dickens, 40; 
saturation, 43. 

Jane Eyre, v. Bronte. 

Janice Meredith, v. P. L. 
Ford. 

John Halifax, Gentleman, v. 
Craik. 

Jokai, Maurice, 239. 

Jonathan Wild, v. Fielding. 

Journal of the Plague Year, 
A, v. Defoe. 

Kenilworth, v. Scott. 

Kidnapped, v. Stevenson. 

Kim, v. Kipling. 

Kingsley, Charles, 66; Hypa- 
tia, 159, 236. 

Kingsley, Henry, 82. 

Kipling, Rudyard, 55, 56, 216, 
239, 240; Kim, 22, 199, 241, 
281; Soldiers Three, 83. 



Lark, The, 45. 

Last of the Barons, The, v. 
Bulwer-Lytton. 

Leatherstocking Tales, The, 
v. Cooper. 

Legend of Montrose, A, v. 
Scott. 

Lemaitre, Jules, on the Gon- 
courts, 117. 

Le Sage, Gil Bias, 210. 

Les Miserables, v. Hugo. 

Lessways, Hilda, v. Bennett 

Lewis, M. G , The Monk, 56. 

Libraries, proportion of fic- 
tion in, 2-4. 

Life and Death of Mr. Bad- 
man, The, v. Bunyan. 

Local Colour, 237. 

London, Jack, 260. 

Lost Sir Massingberd, The, v. 
Payn. 

Luck of Barry Lyndon, The, 
v. Thackeray. 

Macdonnell, Miss Annie, on 
Hardy's feeling for nature, 
216. 

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 33. 

Maigron, Prof. Louis, on 
Scott's descriptions of per- 
sons, 128. 

Mansfield Park, v. Austen. 

Marius the Epicurean, v. 
Pater. 

Markheim, v. Stevenson. 

Marrvat, David Simple, 186. 

Marvellous, The, 108; v. 
probability. 

Masson, British Novelists, 4. 

Master of Ballantrae, The, v. 
Stevenson. 

Maupassant, Guy de, 212; 
The Baptism, 61. 

Mayor of Carterbridge, The, 
v. Hardy. 



288 



INDEX 



Melodrama, 176. 

Meredith, George, 60, 90, 92, 
102, 157, 199, 255, 257; 
The Adventures of Harry 
Richmond, 41 ; Diana of 
the Crossways, 38; The 
Egoist, 77, 109, 113, 185, 
186, 280; The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel, 77, 81, 104, 
122, 162, 172, 259, 262, 280, 

Merry Men, The, v. Steven- 
son. 

Middlemarch, v. Eliot. 

Milieu, 223. 

Mill on the Floss, The, v. 
Eliot. 

Milton, John, his humour, 
189; Paradise Lost, 51, 143, 
172. 

Mr. Griffith's Love Story, v. 
Eliot. 

Moliere, 186. 

Monk, The, v. Lewis. 

Montaigne, 196. 

Moralizing authors, 258. 

Morier, Hajji Babba, 239. 

Murders of the Rue Morgue, 
The, v. Poe. 

Murfree, Miss, 239. 

Naturalists, 61. 

Nature, 200. 

Newcomes, The, v. Thackeray. 

Newman, J. H , Callista, 236. 

Newman, on Scott, 254. 

Nicholas Nickleby, v. Dick- 
ens. 

Normality, 137. 

Norris, Frank, The Pit, 36, 
261. 

Novel, compared with other 
forms, 11-23; biography, 
17; drama, 11, 15; epic, 13; 
romance, 19; short story: 
a middle-class type, 27; a 



modern form, 23; religious 
prejudice against, 26. 

Novels for the market, pub- 
lic, importance, 7-10. 

Numa Roumestam, v. Al- 
phonse Daudet, 61. 

Old Mortality, v. Scott. 
Old Wives' Tale, v. Bennett. 
Oliver Twist, v. Dickens. 
Our Mutual Friend, v. Dick- 
ens. 

Pair of Blue Eyes, A, v. 
Hardy. 

Pamela, v. Richardson. 

Pater, Walter, Marius the 
Epicurean, 67. 

Pathos, range in novels, 196; 
v. tragedy. 

Payn, James, The Lost Sir 
Massingberd, 78. 

Peau de Chagrin, Le, v. Bal- 
zac. 

Pendennis, v. Thackeray. 

Philosophy of an author, 252, 
265. 

Pickwick Papers, v. Dickens. 

Plot, action, contest, the fa- 
ble, 66-70; beginning, mid- 
dle, and end (v. beginning 
and end), 99; definition, 
76, 91; emphasis, repeti- 
tion, contrast, climax, 83; 
pattern, order, logic, 72; 
progression (story-teller's 
knack), 82; anecdotic, 98; 
dramatic, 92; epic, 96; epi- 
sodic, 97. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 33; The 
Black Cat, 21; The Fall 
of the House of Usher, 199; 
The Murders of the Rue 
Morgue, The Purloined Let- 
ter, 78; his humour, 191; 



INDEX 



289 



Woodberry on the humour 
of, 196. 

Polenz, Wilhelm von, 58; Der 
Biittnerbauer, 162. 

Polti, G., Les trente-six situ- 
ations dramatiques, 15, 50. 

Pope, Alexander, 30. 

Pride and Prejudice, v. Aus- 
ten. 

Probability and improbabil- 
ity; fiction vs. our own af- 
fairs, 48; external marvel, 
51 ; the realists, 58. 

Purloined Letter, The, v. Poe. 

Quentin Durward, v. Scott. 

Radcliffe, Mrs., 33, 215; The 
Mysteries of Udolpho, 204, 
222. 

Reade, Charles, 66, 232; 
The Cloister and the 
Hearth, 81, 229; It Is 
Never too Late to Mend, 
259. 

Realism, 58. 

Realists, 257. 

Redgauntlet, v. Scott. 

Return of the Native, The, 
v. Hardy. 

Richardson, Samuel, 29, 256; 
Clarissa Harlowe, 161, 171, 
176, 249; Pamela, 129. 

Richard Yea-and-Nay, v. 
Hewlett. 

Robinson Crusoe, v. Defoe. 

Rob Roy, v. Scott. 

Roderick Randon, v. Smollett. 

Roe, E. P., Barriers Burned 
Away, 149. 

Rolland, 258. 

Romance, 19, 54. 

Romanticism, 178. 

Romola, v. Eliot. 



Rudin, v. Turgenev. 
Ruskin on Scott, 254. 

Scenery, 200. 

Scenes of Clerical Life, v. 
Eliot. 

Schiller on the dramatic sit- 
uations, 16. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 20, 54, 82, 
92, 102, 104, 109, 122, 
154, 155, 215, 226, 230, 
232, 237, 242, 245, 253, 271, 
278; The Abbot, 234; Guy 
Mannering, 46; The Heart 
of Midlothian, 233; Ivan- 
hoe, 81, 123, 128, 142, 222, 
231; Kenilworth, 129; A 
Legend of Montrose, 137; 
Marmion, 123, 179; Old 
Mortality, 123 ; Quentin 
Durward, 70; Redgauntlet, 
142; Rob Roy, 44, 111, 123, 
179; Waverley, 123, 142, 
198, 231, 233; his influence, 
5. 

Senior, criticism of Rob Roy, 
111. 

Sentimentality, 177. 

Setting, buildings, 219; defi- 
nition, 198; growth of im- 
portance, 250 ; historical 
novels, 223; local colour, 
237; man's handiwork, 217; 
nature, 200; the scene, 200; 
scenery, 207; social groups, 
244; source of action, 275. 

Shakespeare, 131, 265; Lear, 
18, 122; imaginative con- 
gruousness, 36. 

Shakespearean tragic charac- 
ter, 160. 

Shelley, Mrs. M. W., Frank- 
enstein, 56. 

Sherlock Holmes, v. Doyle. 

Sienkiewicz, 239. 



290 



INDEX 



Sieur de Maletroit's Door, 
The, v. Stevenson. 

Silas Lapham, v. Howells. 

Silas Marner, v. Eliot. 

Small House at Allington, 
The, v. Trollope 

Smollett, Tobias, 215, 257; 
Humphrey Clinker, 192, 
202, 249; Roderick Ran- 
dom, 42. 

Soldiers Three, v. Kipling. 

Sophocles, 165; Antigone, 
122. 

Sorrows of Werther, The, v. 
Goethe. 

Spanish Gypsy, The, v. Eliot, 

Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 
51. 

Statistics of production of 
novels, 1-7. 

Stephen, L., on Defoe, 39. 

Sterne, Laurence, 257; Tris- 
tram Shandy, 154, 259. 

Stevenson, R. L., 82, 155, 257, 
272, 281; The Black Arrow, 
243; Doctor Jekyll and 
Mr. Hyde, 271; Kidnapped, 
271; Markheim, 211; The 
Master of Ballantrae, 69; 
The Merry Men, 199; The 
Sieur de Maletroit's Door, 
273; Treasure Island, 142, 
271; Weir of Hermiston, 
22; Will of the Mill, 271. 

Stockton, Frank R., The Hun- 
dredth Man, 137. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle 
Tom's Cabin, 261. 

Sully, Thomas, on the laugh- 
ter of savages, 188 

Swift, Jonathan, his humour, 
189. 

Symons, Arthur, on the Gon- 
courts, 116. 



Taine, H., on Dickens, 205. 

Tale of Two Cities, A, v. 
Dickens. 

Taras Bulba, v. Gogol. 

Tartarin de Tarascon, v. 
Daudet. 

Temperament, 209, 254, 259, 

269. 
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, v. 
Hardy. 

Thackeray, William M., 92, 
104, 134, 178, 184, 186, 226, 
232, 237, 244, 257, 281; 
The Luck of Barry Lyndon, 
140; Catherine, 140; Henry 
Esmond, 14, 41, 90, 127, 
229, 262; The Newcomes, 
110, 192; Pendennis, 97, 
153, 158; Vanity Fair, 78, 
79, 81, 85, 89, 127; The Vir- 
ginians, 110; dramatized: 
tragic characters, 164, 170. 

Three Bears, The, 76, 78. 

Three Musketeers, The, v. 
Dumas. 

Tolstov, Leo, 44, 58, 59, 62, 
64, 90, 131, 157, 174, 250, 
258, 259; Anna Karenina, 
70, 122, 142, 162, 171; War 
and Peace, 16, 142, 259. 

Tom Jones, v. Fielding. 

Tono-Bungay, v. Wells. 

Tragedy, mechanical Aristo- 
telianism, 164. 

Tragedy and Comedy, sources 
analogous, 182. 

Tragedy of death, 169; o<f 
helplessness, pity, 173; of 
pain and degradation, 171; 
of romantic paradox (sin 
as a halo), 178; world mal- 
adjustment, 163, 168. 

Tragedy, definition, 160, 172; 
range in novels, 196. 



INDEX 



291 



Tragedy, v. Greek, French, 
Shakespearean tragic char- 
acter. 

Treasure Island, v. Steven- 
son. 

Tristram Shandy, v. Sterne. 

Trollope, Anthony, 47, 82, 
138, 199, 259; Barchester 
Towers, 13; The Small 
House at Allington, 186; 
The Warden, 38, 93. 

Truth, cowardice of glossing 
over, 264. 

Turgenev, 21, 48, 90, 239; 
Rudin, 132. 

Typhoon, v. Conrad. 

Tytler, Mrs., 35. 



Udolpho, The Mysteries of, 

v. Radcliffe. 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, v. Stowe. 
Under the Greenwood Tree, 

v. Hardy. 
Unity, v. imaginative unity. 
Ursule Mirouet, v. Balzac. 



Vanity Fair, v. Thackeray. 
Vicar of Wakefield, The, v. 

Goldsmith. 
Vicomte de Bragelonne, Le, 

v. Dumas. 



Vigny, Alfred de, 239. 
Virginians, The, v. Thackeray. 

Walpole, Horace, The Castle 

of Otranto, 221. 
Walpole, Hugh, The Dark 

Forest, 249; The Duchess 

of Wrexe, 246. 
War and Peace, v. Tolstoy. 
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 147. 
Warden, The, v. Trollope. 
Way of All Flesh, The, v. 

Butler. 
Wells, H. G., 92, 148, 157, 

257, 258, 260; Tono-Bun- 

gay, 70; his humour, 194. 
What Maisie Knew, v. James. 
Will of the Mill, v. Steven- 
son. 
Woman in White, The, v. 

Collins. 
W 7 oodberry, on Poe's humour, 

190. 
Woodlanders, The, v. Hardy. 
Wordsworth, William, 62, 

148, 175, 214; quoted, 196. 
Wuthering Heights, v. 

Bronte. 

Yonge, Charlotte, 147 

Zola, Emile, 16, 58, 59, 62, 
131, 257 



40V 



919 



